Your body shape can tell you a lot about your health. The Conicity Index measures whether you carry fat evenly throughout your body or mostly around the middle.
As fat builds up around your belly, your body will start to have a bigger middle and narrower shoulders and hips. This "apple shape" is essentially what the Conicity Index is measuring.
Where you store fat is more important than your overall weight. You could have a perfectly normal BMI, but if all your fat is around your waist then you could still be at risk.
What is the Conicity Index?
The Conicity Index was developed in the early 1990s and uses your waist circumference along with your height and weight to calculate how much fat you have around your middle in comparison to the rest of your body.
The scale ranges from 1.0 (fat is evenly distributed) to around 1.73 (all the weight is around the middle). Most people fall somewhere in between, usually ranging from 1.0 to 1.35.
How It's Calculated
The formula uses your waist measurement as well as your height and weight to give you an indication of how much fat you are storing around the middle:
CI = Waist / (0.109 × √(Weight / Height))
The waist measurement needs to be in meters, weight in kilograms and height in meters. (Our calculator takes care of conversion automatically). The 0.109 figure is a constant that was calculated as the average density of a human body.
If you get a score of exactly 1.0 that means your weight is perfectly distributed. The higher above 1.0, the more your weight is concentrated around your middle.
Conicity Index Categories
| Category | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Low Risk | < 1.25 | < 1.18 |
| Moderate Risk | 1.25-1.35 | 1.18-1.25 |
| High Risk | > 1.35 | > 1.25 |
Why This Matters for Your Health
Having excess belly fat isn't just a matter of how you look - it's actually one of the strongest predictors of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and metabolic disorders. The Conicity Index can pick up health problems that BMI misses, particularly if you are someone who looks slim but is storing fat around their organs.
In studies, it has been found that the Conicity Index is actually a better predictor of cardiovascular events than BMI. This is because it takes into account where the fat is, not just how much of it there is.
Want to learn more about your body composition? Try our waist-to-height ratio calculator or waist-to-hip ratio calculator for additional perspectives.