What is a healthy waist size for my height?
Less than half your height, in whatever units you like. For someone 178 cm tall that is a waist under 89 cm; at 5 foot 6 it is under 33 inches. The ratio works because it needs no separate cutoffs for men, women or ethnicity, which fixed waist numbers do.
NICE adopted this in January 2026 with three bands: 0.4 to 0.49 healthy, 0.5 to 0.59 increased health risks, and 0.6 or above further increased risk. The same thresholds apply to children from age five, which BMI cannot manage without percentile charts.
One honest caveat. The case for it is that it catches central fat in people whose BMI reads normal and works on muscular people, where BMI does not. It is not that it predicts death better than BMI: the largest recent test of that, 94,401 people and 48,323 deaths, found the two about equal.
Source: NICE guideline NG246, overweight and obesity management
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