Ideal Weight Calculator
The ideal weight calculator you just used was built for a different body. Here is the India-correct number.
For most Indian adults, a healthy weight sits between a BMI of 18.5 and 22.9. Multiply your height in metres by itself, then multiply that by 18.5 and by 22.9. Those two numbers are your range. Someone who is 168 cm tall lands between 52 kg and 65 kg. There is no single correct weight inside that band, and the band does not change with your sex.
That answer looks nothing like what a typical ideal weight calculator gives you, which is one precise figure that differs by several kilograms depending on whether you tick male or female. The usual formula was designed for a job that has nothing to do with health and it was calibrated on a population whose bodies behave differently from ours.
Ideal Weight Calculator
Accurate target estimates powered by ICMR & WHO clinical consensus formulas.
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Fill in your specifications and click "Calculate Ideal Weight" to see your target weight, healthy range, visual spectrum, and clinical formula comparison.
Target Ideal Weight
Clinical Formula Comparison
So what should you weigh for your height?
The table below is built directly from the Indian healthy BMI band. No formula, no sex adjustment, no assumptions imported from anywhere else. Find your height, read across.
| Height | Approx. | Healthy weight range (BMI 18.5 to 22.9) | Obesity threshold (BMI 25) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 147 cm | 4 ft 10 in | 40.0 to 49.5 kg | 54.0 kg |
| 150 cm | 4 ft 11 in | 41.6 to 51.5 kg | 56.2 kg |
| 152 cm | 5 ft 0 in | 42.7 to 52.9 kg | 57.8 kg |
| 155 cm | 5 ft 1 in | 44.4 to 55.0 kg | 60.1 kg |
| 157 cm | 5 ft 2 in | 45.6 to 56.4 kg | 61.6 kg |
| 160 cm | 5 ft 3 in | 47.4 to 58.6 kg | 64.0 kg |
| 163 cm | 5 ft 4 in | 49.2 to 60.8 kg | 66.4 kg |
| 165 cm | 5 ft 5 in | 50.4 to 62.3 kg | 68.1 kg |
| 168 cm | 5 ft 6 in | 52.2 to 64.6 kg | 70.6 kg |
| 170 cm | 5 ft 7 in | 53.5 to 66.2 kg | 72.2 kg |
| 173 cm | 5 ft 8 in | 55.4 to 68.5 kg | 74.8 kg |
| 175 cm | 5 ft 9 in | 56.7 to 70.1 kg | 76.6 kg |
| 178 cm | 5 ft 10 in | 58.6 to 72.6 kg | 79.2 kg |
| 180 cm | 5 ft 11 in | 59.9 to 74.2 kg | 81.0 kg |
| 183 cm | 6 ft 0 in | 62.0 to 76.7 kg | 83.7 kg |
| 185 cm | 6 ft 1 in | 63.3 to 78.4 kg | 85.6 kg |
Two things stand out. The range is wide, often 12 kg or more, and that width is real rather than sloppy. Body composition, muscle mass and bone structure all vary, and a chart cannot see any of it.
The column worth noticing is the last one. In India, obesity is diagnosed at a BMI of 25, not 30. A 168 cm adult weighing 71 kg meets the Indian threshold for obesity while sitting comfortably in the “normal” band on any calculator built for Western use. That gap is where a lot of Indian metabolic disease hides.
Where does the "ideal weight" number actually come from?
Almost every ideal weight calculator online runs one of four equations: Devine, Robinson, Miller or Hamwi. The most widely used is Devine and its origin is stranger than most people expect.
In 1974, a pharmacist named Ben Devine published a short case study on adjusting a gentamicin antibiotic dose for people with impaired kidney function. Near the end of the discussion he introduced a quick rule for estimating body weight: 50 kg for a man at five feet, 45.5 kg for a woman, plus 2.3 kg for every additional inch. He offered it as a rough stand-in for lean body weight.
A 2021 review in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy notes that Devine gave no explanation of where the numbers came from, that the later equations were built from actuarial height and weight tables, and that none of them is well validated.
That is the whole provenance. A dosing shortcut, published without derivation, later borrowed by the internet and relabelled as a health goal. It was never designed to tell you what to weigh.
The 2016 paper that finally reconciled these equations with BMI, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, made the mismatch explicit. It found that the older equations quietly correspond to different BMI values for men and women, around 22.5 for men against 21.0 for women, which means the sex difference in your calculator result is an artefact of arithmetic rather than a statement about bodies.
Why does that formula give the wrong answer in India?
Run the Devine equation for an Indian man and check what BMI it implies. At 160 cm, it returns 56.9 kg and a BMI of 22.2. At 170 cm, it returns 65.9 kg and a BMI of 22.8. At 175 cm, it returns 70.5 kg and the implied BMI crosses 23.0.
That matters, because 23 is the point at which Indian clinical guidance begin to call it a problem. For Indian men taller than roughly 175 cm, the standard ideal weight formula hands back a number that already sits inside the Indian overweight range.
Why India uses lower cut-offs
A WHO expert consultation published in The Lancet in 2004 concluded that the proportion of Asian people at high risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease is substantial at BMI values below the global overweight cut-off of 25 and identified 23.0 as an additional public health action point.
In January 2025, a national group of Indian experts went further. Their revised definition, published in Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research and Reviews, replaced the 2009 BMI-only guidance with a two-stage model.
Stage 1 covers increased adiposity at a BMI above 23 without effects on organ function or daily activity. Stage 2 adds abdominal obesity, functional limitation or an existing related condition. Waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio now sit alongside BMI rather than behind it.
The scale of the issue is not small. The ICMR-INDIAB national survey of more than 113,000 adults across 31 states and union territories found generalised obesity in 28.6% of adults and abdominal obesity in 39.5%, which works out to roughly 254 million and 351 million people respectively.
Should the number be different for men and women?
Not when it is derived from BMI. The Indian healthy band of 18.5 to 22.9 applies to both, so a woman and a man of the same height have the same healthy weight range.
Where sex does matter is in what sits underneath that weight. Women carry a higher proportion of body fat at any given BMI, and that is normal physiology, not a problem to correct. It is also why the abdominal thresholds differ: 90 cm for men and 80 cm for women.
So a 163 cm woman and a 163 cm man both sit healthily between 49 kg and 61 kg. If a calculator tells the woman she should weigh 55 kg and the man 60 kg, it is applying a 1970s formula, not a clinical finding.
Is a single number even the right thing to aim at?
This is where “ideal weight” and “healthy weight” separate and the distinction is worth holding on to.
Ideal weight is a formula output. One number, one height, one sex, no context. Healthy weight is a range of body weights at which risk of metabolic disease is lowest for your population and it accommodates the fact that two people of identical height can be built very differently.
Aiming at a single figure creates a problem that has nothing to do with physiology. A person 500 grams above their “ideal” reads that as failure and a person who reaches it exactly assumes the work is finished. Neither reading matches what the number can actually tell you.
The 2016 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition analysis made the same point in technical terms, observing that earlier equations failed to recognise that there is a range of ideal or target body weights rather than one value.
Why your waist may tell you more than the scale does
There is a well-known photograph in The Lancet from 2004 showing two diabetes researchers standing side by side. Chittaranjan Yajnik in Pune and John Yudkin in London had near-identical BMIs of 22.3. Body scans showed Yajnik carrying 21.2 percent body fat against Yudkin’s 9.1 percent. Same height-to-weight ratio, completely different bodies.
That image is not an outlier. A review across Asian populations found that at the same BMI, body fat runs 3 to 5 percentage points higher than in European populations, and that reaching the same body fat percentage takes a BMI 3 to 4 units lower. Among Asian groups studied, Indians carried the highest body fat of all.
This is why a weight that looks fine on a chart can still sit on top of a metabolically unhelpful amount of abdominal fat, and why the 2025 Indian guidance moved waist measurement into the definition itself.
The simplest check you can do at home
Keep your waist under half your height. Measure at the navel, standing relaxed, without pulling the tape tight.
A pooled analysis of studies covering more than 300,000 adults across several ethnic groups found that waist-to-height ratio discriminated cardiometabolic risk better than either waist circumference or BMI, with 0.5 emerging as the sensible boundary.
| Your height | Half your height | Women: keep under | Men: keep under |
|---|---|---|---|
| 152 cm (5 ft 0 in) | 76 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 157 cm (5 ft 2 in) | 78 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 163 cm (5 ft 4 in) | 81 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 168 cm (5 ft 6 in) | 84 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 173 cm (5 ft 8 in) | 86 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 178 cm (5 ft 10 in) | 89 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
| 183 cm (6 ft 0 in) | 91 cm | 80 cm | 90 cm |
Where the two guides disagree, take the lower one. A 178 cm woman should treat 80 cm as her line rather than 89 cm.
Does your ideal weight change with age or body frame?
Age does not change the thresholds. The Indian cut-offs of 23 and 25 apply across adulthood, and there is no separate chart for your forties. What changes is body composition. Muscle mass declines gradually from around the fourth decade, so the same weight on the scale at 45 often represents more fat and less muscle than it did at 25, with the same waist creeping outward.
The number holds steady while the body underneath it shifts. This is an argument for tracking your waist alongside your weight, not for relaxing the target.
Body frame is a weaker idea than it appears. The traditional adjustment, add or subtract 10% for a large or small frame, traces back to the same actuarial tables that produced the ideal weight equations, and frame size is usually estimated from wrist circumference or elbow width.
It is not a validated clinical measure, and no current Indian or global obesity guidance uses it. If you feel your build sits outside the ordinary, body composition assessment will tell you something real. A frame adjustment mostly just moves the goalposts.
What if you have PCOS or a thyroid condition?
The target does not change. The route to it does and so does what counts as progress.
With PCOS, insulin resistance is a central feature and it is present regardless of body size. The useful finding here is how little movement is needed for something to shift: a loss of around 5 percent of body weight is repeatedly associated with improved ovulation and metabolic markers in women with PCOS who carry excess weight.
The 2023 international evidence-based PCOS guideline treats supported lifestyle change as foundational with additional options considered case by case under medical care.
With an underactive thyroid, expectations need adjusting in the other direction. A controlled follow-up study found that the weight lost after starting thyroid hormone replacement came almost entirely from excess body water rather than fat. Fat mass did not change.
Treating the thyroid correctly is necessary and it will make you feel better, but it is not a weight loss intervention, and the several kilograms many people attribute to their thyroid are usually only partly explained by it.
What is a better target than a number on a chart?
Five percent of what you weigh today.
A randomised controlled trial published in Cell Metabolism compared groups losing roughly 5, 11 and 16 percent of body weight. At 5 percent, insulin sensitivity improved in fat tissue, liver and muscle, and beta cell function improved as well. Further loss kept improving muscle insulin sensitivity and beta cell function but the liver and fat tissue had already captured most of their benefit at 5%.
For someone at 85 kg, that is a little over 4 kg. It is a target you can picture and unlike a chart number it does not depend on your height, your frame or which formula a website happens to use.
It also reframes the question in a more useful direction. Rather than asking how far you are from an ideal, you ask what the next 5% would do for you. For most people carrying extra weight, the answer involves blood sugar, blood pressure and liver fat well before it involves the mirror.
Where clinical care fits
If your BMI sits above 23 with an abdominal measurement over the Indian threshold, or above 25 on its own, that is the point at which Indian guidance considers structured medical assessment appropriate rather than another round of self-directed effort. What that assessment looks at is broader than weight: blood sugar, lipids, liver markers, thyroid function, sleep and the history behind how the weight arrived.
Weight regulation is biological rather than a matter of willpower and treating it as a medical condition tends to produce better decisions than treating it as a personal failing.
The Bottom Line
Your healthy weight for your height is a range, it is the same for men and women, and for Indian adults it runs from a BMI of 18.5 to 22.9. The precise-looking number from an ideal weight calculator comes from a 1974 antibiotic dosing note that was never validated as a health target and never calibrated for Indian bodies. Measure your waist alongside your weight, keep it under half your height, and aim for 5% of your current weight rather than a figure on a chart.
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Questions worth asking before you start
What is the ideal weight for 5 feet 6 inches in kg?
At 168 cm, the healthy range for an Indian adult is roughly 52 kg to 65 kg, based on a BMI of 18.5 to 22.9. The same range applies to men and women. A weight of 71 kg at this height meets the Indian threshold for obesity, which is a BMI of 25.
How much should a 5 foot 4 inch Indian woman weigh?
At 163 cm, the healthy range is roughly 49 kg to 61 kg. Waist measurement matters alongside this: under 80 cm for women and ideally under 81 cm, which is half of 163 cm. If the weight sits in range but the waist does not, the waist is the more useful signal.
Which formula is used to calculate ideal body weight?
Most calculators use the Devine equation from 1974, or one of its variants by Robinson, Miller or Hamwi. All were built for medication dosing or from actuarial height and weight tables, none is well validated as a health target, and none was calibrated for Indian populations.
Is ideal weight different for men and women at the same height?
Not when it is derived from BMI, because the healthy BMI band is the same for both. The sex difference in calculator results come from the formula, which was constructed with separate starting values for men and women. Body fat percentage does differ by sex which is why waist thresholds differ.
Is it healthier to aim for a target weight or a target range?
A range. Body composition varies enough between people of the same height that no single figure applies to everyone, and a range removes the false precision that makes a half kilogram feel like a verdict. A percentage change from your current weight, starting with 5%, is more useful still.
Medical disclaimer
This article is for education and general information. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a substitute for consultation with a qualified doctor. Weight, body composition and metabolic risk should be assessed individually by a registered medical practitioner, particularly if you have PCOS, thyroid disease, diabetes, an eating disorder history, or are pregnant or breastfeeding. Do not begin, change or stop any treatment based on this content.
