A woman who is 5’7″ generally falls within a healthy weight range of 123 to 163 pounds, depending on her body frame, age, and muscle mass. The most commonly cited “ideal” weight from clinical formulas lands around 135 pounds, but that single number misses important context about how bodies actually differ.
Healthy Weight Range by Frame Size
Your bone structure plays a real role in what you should weigh. The Metropolitan Life Insurance tables, one of the longest-standing references for healthy weight, break down the range for a 5’7″ woman like this:
- Small frame: 123 to 136 pounds
- Medium frame: 133 to 147 pounds
- Large frame: 143 to 163 pounds
That’s a 40-pound spread from the bottom of the small-frame range to the top of the large-frame range. A quick way to estimate your frame size: wrap your thumb and middle finger around your opposite wrist. If they overlap, you likely have a small frame. If they just touch, medium. If there’s a gap, large. It’s rough, but it gives you a starting point.
What Clinical Formulas Suggest
The Hamwi formula, commonly used in clinical nutrition, calculates ideal body weight for women by starting at 100 pounds for the first 5 feet of height, then adding 5 pounds per additional inch. For a 5’7″ woman, that works out to 135 pounds. To account for frame size, the formula adds or subtracts 10 percent: roughly 122 pounds for a small frame and 149 pounds for a large one.
BMI offers another lens. For a 5’7″ woman, the “normal” BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9 translates to about 118 to 159 pounds. But BMI has well-known blind spots. It can’t distinguish between fat and muscle, so a woman who strength trains regularly might land above 159 pounds while being metabolically healthy. Conversely, someone within the “normal” range could carry excess body fat if they have very little muscle.
Why Body Composition Matters More Than the Scale
Two women who are both 5’7″ and 145 pounds can look completely different and have very different health profiles. The difference comes down to how much of that weight is muscle versus fat. Muscle is denser than fat, meaning it takes up less space pound for pound. A woman with more muscle mass will typically wear a smaller clothing size at the same weight, and she’ll carry lower metabolic risk.
For adult women, a body fat percentage above 36% is considered overweight, and above 42% is classified as obese, according to research published through Harvard Health. These thresholds matter because they correlate with health outcomes in ways that scale weight alone does not. You can stay at the same weight for years while gradually losing muscle and gaining fat, especially after 40. If your waist size is creeping up but the number on the scale hasn’t changed, that shift is worth paying attention to.
One of the simplest ways to gauge whether your weight is in a healthy place is the waist-to-height ratio. The NHS recommends keeping your waist circumference below half your height. For a 5’7″ woman (67 inches), that means a waist measurement under 33.5 inches. This metric captures visceral fat, the type stored around your organs, which drives more health risk than fat stored in your hips or thighs.
How Age Shifts the Target
The “ideal” weight for a 25-year-old and a 70-year-old at the same height isn’t the same. As you age, muscle mass naturally declines and body fat tends to increase, even if your weight holds steady. But the research on older adults suggests that carrying a few extra pounds may actually be protective.
A meta-analysis of over 64,000 community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older found that the lowest mortality risk corresponded to a BMI between 27.5 and 30, a range that would be classified as “overweight” by standard guidelines. For a 5’7″ woman, that translates to roughly 175 to 191 pounds. A separate analysis of nearly 3 million people confirmed a similar pattern, with the optimal range for adults over 65 falling between a BMI of 25 and 30. The takeaway: being slightly above the textbook “normal” range in your later decades is not the red flag it’s often made out to be.
Ethnicity and Adjusted Thresholds
Standard BMI cutoffs were developed primarily from data on white European populations, and they don’t apply equally to everyone. Asian women, for example, tend to develop metabolic complications like type 2 diabetes and heart disease at lower body weights. The World Health Organization has proposed lowering the overweight threshold for Asian populations from a BMI of 25 to 23. For a 5’7″ woman, that shifts the upper end of “normal” from about 159 pounds down to 147 pounds.
Research from the American Heart Association found that when traditional BMI cutoffs were used, Asian Americans appeared to have better cardiovascular health than other groups. But when the adjusted threshold of 23 was applied, that advantage disappeared. If you’re of East Asian, South Asian, or Southeast Asian descent, the lower cutoff gives a more accurate picture of your metabolic risk.
Finding Your Personal Target
Rather than fixating on a single number, it helps to think of your healthy weight as a range shaped by several factors: your frame size, how much muscle you carry, your age, and your ethnic background. A 5’7″ woman with a medium frame, moderate activity level, and no specific risk factors will generally do well somewhere between 133 and 150 pounds. But a strength-training athlete at 160 pounds with a 30-inch waist is in a healthier position than a sedentary person at 140 pounds with a 35-inch waist.
If you want a quick self-check beyond the scale, measure your waist at the narrowest point above your belly button. Keep it under 33.5 inches. Track whether your waist is trending up over time, even if your weight isn’t. And if you’re over 65, don’t panic about landing in the “overweight” BMI category, because the data suggests that range carries the lowest risk for your age group.