Ideal Weight for a 17-Year-Old Male

While it is helpful to use medical information to gauge how close you are to the appropriate weight for your age, many factors influence how close the weight of a 17-year-old male is to the ideal.

Considerations

• To compare the weight of a 17-year-old male to an appropriate weight according to medical height/weight charts, you must first calculate the adolescent's body mass index (BMI). This is because ideal weight is a function of the child's height, and a BMI calculator takes both height and weight into account.

Identification

• Use an online BMI calculator to calculate the body mass index of the child. Then, using a medical growth chart for males, locate 17 along the X-axis and follow the line to determine whether he falls within a healthy range. The median BMI index for a 17-year old-male is 22. If the BMI value falls under the 5th percentile, the individual is considered underweight. A BMI above the 95th percentile indicates the child is overweight.

Benefits

• Maintaining a healthy weight helps prevent diseases associated with being overweight, including high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Awareness of how BMI compares to that of a healthy 17-year-old adolescent helps doctors treat or prevent these disorders.