Surprising Celebrity BMIs

With plenty of cash to hire personal trainers and private chefs, Hollywood’s hottest have all the tools in place for perfect health. But if you judge celebrities’ fitness only by BMI, or body mass index, the numbers tell a different story.

BMI looks at height and weight to measure a person’s body fatness, placing them in four broad categories: underweight (18.5 or lower), normal weight (18.5 to 24.9), overweight (25 to 29.9), and obese (30 and up). Some life insurance companies look at BMI measurements in considering the cost of coverage. But is this really an accurate measure of body composition?

Often the numbers don’t add up. For athletes with loads of lean muscle mass, BMI measurements can be misleading because the scale doesn’t differentiate between muscle and fat. That means that the world’s top sports stars are often classified as overweight. But even the trimmest actors—particularly the shorter ones—aren’t immune to confusing BMI classifications.

We asked our top two nutrition experts to put BMI to the test with seven celebrities. Registered dietitians Frances Largeman-Roth and Julie Upton, both members of the American Dietetic Association, analyzed photos of these stars. Keeping heights in mind, they offered their best estimates of their weights, and we started crunching the numbers.

Next page: Angelina Jolie