After call to overhaul diagnosis of obesity, how can you tell if your weight is a problem?

Clinicians can instead determine whether someone has ‘clinical’ or ‘pre-clinical’ obesity and assess their risk of developing health problems and disease. Photograph: bdavid32/Alamy

This week, doctors confirmed what many people have felt for a long time: the way we think about obesity is not helpful, BMI (body mass index) is unreliable, and this needs to change.

The Lancet Commission has urged a “radical overhaul” of how obesity is diagnosed, warning that reliance on BMI has resulted in both under- and over-diagnosis of the condition affecting approximately 1 billion people globally.