Is losing weight an important health goal?

Accepting your body as it is and stopping all the dieting may sound great, but would doing so hurt your health?

Advertisements, pop culture and even doctors can talk about health and weight as if they are one and the same: smaller bodies are healthier, and larger bodies must be unhealthy.

But neither health nor bodies are that simple and uniform, and health can vary from person to person said Jeanette Thompson-Wessen, a nutritionist in the United Kingdom whose approach doesn't focus on weight loss.

A higher body mass index (BMI) is associated with conditions like diabetes and heart disease, said Philipp Scherer, professor of internal medicine and director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. However, BMI is a controversial way to measure health, and it's just one of many factors associated with changes in a person's well-being, said Dr. Asher Larmie, a UK-based general practitioner and activist.

Medical care, environment, social circumstances and biology make up the majority of the factors that determine our health, according to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion's Healthy People 2020.

Still, we often place a lot of importance on a person's appearance when assessing their health, said Shana Minei Spence, a registered dietitian in New York. And even if we learn to shed the burden of societal beauty standards, it can be difficult to feel confident in your body if you view your size as unhealthy.

Experts say that it may be time to untangle health and weight and focus more on behaviors that promote our health than the number on the scale.

Correlation versus causationIt's important to understand that the studies that point to terrible health outcomes for people with higher body fat can only point to correlation, not causation, Larmie said.

While studies can say that people at a higher weight often have more instances of heart disease, they can't say that the weight caused the heart problems, Larmie added.

But the importance of those studies shouldn't be discounted, Scherer said. The correlations are strong, and "from a physiology perspective, in the clinic we work with correlations," he said.

Other factors could still be at play, however, like access to medical care, Scherer said.

And for people in larger bodies, good medical care can be hard to come by, said Bri Campos, a body image coach based in Paramus, New Jersey.

It's not just her clients who fear going to the doctor. Even though she educates people about their body image and mental health, Campos is often afraid to go to the doctor for fear that she will be shamed about her weight, she said.

"I can go in for strep throat, I can go in for a rash," Campos said.

"Because of my body size, it is very unlikely that I can go to the doctor and get an actual diagnosis that's not 'you should probably lose weight.'"

Bodies aren't business cards

We can't take one look at a person's body and get a sense of their health, their habits or their biology, she said."Do we have access to somebody's medical records? Are we talking to their doctor?" she said. "And often health is honestly sometimes out of our control. There are so many chronic illnesses that people just develop."

Although we can see correlations between body size and health conditions on the large scale, once researchers look at individuals, it's not that clear, Scherer said.

"The field at large really embraces that not everybody who has that very high BMI is a type 2 diabetic," he said.

People in smaller bodies can develop heart disease or diabetes, and there are plenty of people in larger bodies who are considered completely metabolically healthy, Scherer said.

"It's just a reflection of our genetic heterogeneity and how we cope with excess calories," he added.