Hello, and congratulations for making it this far. We're now at Tip Number eight, how to maintain a healthy body weight and a healthy diet or nutritional plan. We work with a few different holistic nutritionists and you can find the meal plans that we like to use in our store on the mend my back program calm. Or if you're part of the full program, you'll receive the E book included in that program. So we want to show you two different evaluations that you can do on your own or with a certified personal trainer to make sure that you're maintaining a healthy body weight and that your weight is not putting you at risk. We know that if we can hold more body weight around the waist, which we call the apple shaped body type that it puts us more at risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes and higher blood pressure and even premature deaths.
So we can avoid a lot of these lifestyle diseases by following the lifestyle tips that we've offered you so far in this program of moving your body well, resting your body well and doing proper movements and exercises to keep your body strong and supple, your spinal thank you for it. So excess weight also puts a lot of strain on the spine, as does weak abdominal, hip or back muscles. So this is what our full program is all about. If you have a measuring tape at home, I'll show you right now on how to perform the waist to hip ratio test, which tells us where we're holding more of our body weight or excess body fat. So we want to divide the two measurements of our waist against our hip So with a measuring tape, somebody else can do this for you as well, sometimes a little bit easier.
We want to find the smallest area of the waist for women and the navel area for men. So we take the two numbers, and that's a relaxed By the way, so we're not sucking it all in. We want to be honest with ourselves. Okay, so once I found the number for my waist, we find the largest part around the bum to take the hip measurement. So from this perspective, it looks like that might be it for me. And I'm recording my two numbers.
So I'll show you how to calculate this now. So my waist was 29 and my hips are 39 and three quarters. So we'll take a calculator I'll go 29 divided by that I think I said 39.75. Okay, so that gives me a score of point seven, three. Now men want to fall into a range of point, nine or less. And women should be in a range of point eight, five or less.
So yeah, I'm in a healthy range right now. So keeping your body weights and your body composition in check is important. And I say body composition. We'll talk about this a little bit more, which is basically the ratio between your lean muscle mass to the fat mass that's in your body. So with the exercises that we're going to be offering later through level three and level four of our men my back program, we're starting to focus we start to focus a little bit more on some resistance exercises. To get our muscles a little bit stronger, but when we're in the acute phase of pain and discomfort, really, we just want to improve our posture, improve our breathing, reduce our stress, start to eat well hydrate Well, all the tips that we've shared with you so far, in this short program of men my back, which will help you give a global approach to your overall well being