Nice site. I enjoyed your “Healthy Body Calculator®.” One question: I notice you direct people to measure their elbow for determining their frame size. Over on the Met Life site, which also has a BMI calculator, they say to measure your wrist. Just curious if you know if both are right or if someone is in error. Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback.

FYI, body frame size is not a factor in calculating BMI which is determined from weight and height only.

Measurement of body frame size has not had a lot of research to back it up. The wrist measurement is based on Caribbean research done on cadavers. I don’t have the reference handy for using elbows. I checked Met Life and they use elbow measurements as well. They still publish height – weight tables, but the ones on their web site look “lighter” than the last published ones I saw.

The bottom line is people think they can weigh more if they have a larger skeletal frame. The reality is most women are small frame and most men are medium frame. Whether you use wrist or elbow, vertical height is still a factor. So, the taller you are, the larger your frame and therefore the more you can weigh.

Basically, in order to estimate body frame size, one would have to choose a site where there is very little overlying fat, tissue or skin on top of your skeleton. The wrist and elbow are the 2 most likely sites to reflect skeletal size. The wrist and elbow tables are pretty gross and should only provide an estimate of skeletal size.