How your weight can affect your life insurance premiums

It's well known that being overweight can have a serious impact on your health. In the UK 39 per cent of people are overweight and 19 per cent are clinically obese. Being obese or overweight makes you more likely to suffer from respiratory problems, stroke, gall bladder disease, heart disease, non-insulin dependent diabetes, cholesterol problems, hypertension and death. Being obese or overweight can also have a serious impact on your chances of getting life insurance and the premiums you pay for your life insurance policy.

Obesity results from the heavy accumulation of fat in the body's cells, with the attendant impact on health. One effective way of determining obesity is through the body mass index (BMI). The BMI is the figure you get when you square the result of dividing your body's weight in kilograms by your height in metres. The average BMI is between 18.5 and 25, while those with a BMI between 25 and 30 are overweight. Obese people have a BMI of over 30.

How Obesity Affects Life Cover
Being obese or overweight won't stop you from getting life cover but it might affect the policies and benefits you can have. The charts used to determine your height and weight (and therefore your propensity to suffer from certain illnesses) will vary from underwriter to underwriter. That means on one chart someone might be of a standard weight while on another the person might just tip over into the overweight category.

Life underwriters will assign insurance ratings depending on where people fall on their charts. They may also assign a higher rating to overweight or obese people looking for critical illness cover because of the increased risk of illnesses such as heart disease, stroke and other diseases which might require long term care.

Special Measures For Life Cover
Some underwriters will take special measures for people who are more than double what insurers believe is the normal weight for their height. This means that such people may not be allowed to take out critical illness cover or sickness-related benefits as add-ons to their life cover policy.

The good news is that these decisions are not set in stone. With people following new diets successfully every day, it's worth knowing that it's never too late to make changes to your term life cover policy. Even if you get a particular rating when you take out a policy, you can change the policy when your circumstances change. So if you lose some weight and qualify for lower premiums or additional benefits, there's nothing to stop you from cancelling the old policy and taking out a new one. And if you gain a few pounds again, it won't affect your policy at all.