Gender Differences in measured body mass index and weight misperception patterns among university students.
Body weight and its perception is an important characteristic of health and play a vital role in physical and mental well-being of the individual. The World Health Organization (WHO) uses the body mass index (BMI) to classify weight status. The BMI is calculated as the weight in kilograms divided by height in meter squares (kg/m2). A BMI 23 be used for overweight and> 25 for obesity as opposed to usual limits of more than 25 and greater than 30 used internationally for overweight and obesity respectively.(1) Values between 18.5 and 23 are considered normal. Research shows varying trends in weight status in different parts of the world. The majority of the studies from the developed world show a high incidence of obesity in adolescents and young adults such as 47% in USA(2) and 25% in UK.( 3) According to recent estimates by WHO in European Union countries, prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults remains 30-70% 10-30% respectively. (4) Similar trends are reported from some Asian countries as Malaysia where 33.6% of adult population was found to be overweight. (5) These studies usually focus on obesity but at the same time some studies point out that the incidence of underweight in
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(14) Similarly, underweight is also known to be associated with increased the risk of morbidity and mortality (15) so it is important to study the behaviors of people leading to abnormal body mass index. This relationship has been only scarcely studied in Pakistan. The present study was planned to estimate the prevalence of under weight and over weight among the students of Bahauddin Zakariy University, Multan and to investigate the misperception patterns among male and female student and also between different BMI