What Is a Healthy Weight for a 12-Year-Old Girl Who Is 5 Feet 3 Inches Tall?

By Staff WriterLast Updated March 28, 2020

According to the Center for Disease Control, a healthy weight for a girl who is 12 years old and 5 feet 3 inches tall is between 84 and 122 pounds. This range puts her between the 5th and 85th percentile of the Body Mass Index chart.

Calculating a child or teenager’s BMI is a useful tool for identifying obesity or malnutrition, but it is far from an exact medical diagnosis. The BMI does not exactly measure the amount of a child’s body fat, but rather it is an approximation based on the height and weight of other children of the same age and sex.