Your weight doesn’t bother you very much because you think it’s ok and because it seems to be just fine if considering the body mass indexes provided by the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. However, when you think about your waist, you suddenly realize that things are not at all perfect and you couldn’t be more right.

According to a study by Dr. Tobias Pischon, of the German Institute of Human Nutrition and colleagues, too much fat stored on your belly can increase the chances of developing life-threatening diseases such as heart disease and cancer. The association between belly fat and such conditions is not new, but the current study gives scientists a far more accurate picture.

The study followed about 360,000 people for a period of 10 years. About 15,000 of them had died during the follow-up period. The study showed that those with the lowest risk of death were men with a BMI of 25.3 and women with a BMI of 24.3. A BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight and a BMI over 30 is considered obese, according to the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The researchers found that that for about two-inch increase in waist size for patients with any given BMI score, the risk of death increased by 17 percent for men and by 13 percent for women.

“We found that a large waist circumference is related to a higher risk of death even for individuals who have the same BMI [body mass index, a ratio of weight to height]. Therefore, you could say that adipose [fat] accumulation in the abdominal region is even more detrimental than just having an elevated BMI level,” said the study's lead author, Dr. Tobias Pischon, of the German Institute of Human Nutrition.