Body Fat Composition vs Body Weight
The best way to tell whether your diet, fitness, or other weight management programs are working for you is to keep track of changes in your body fat composition. Imagine that you weigh 200 lbs on Earth and are 35 percent body fat. On the moon you would instantly lose about 167 lbs because of lower gravity. However, your body would still be 35 percent fat.
You want to lose body fat, not necessarily weight.
Body Fat Calculations and Types of Fat
White fat and brown fat are the two main types of adipose tissue. You also have fat in every cell membrane in your body. There is no easy way to tell how much of each type of fat you have.
The newest research on fat types is about brown fat. It used to be known as just baby fat. Now we know that it also occurs in adults. Adults carry it mostly it around the neck and in the upper chest area. Scientists now know that the more brown fat we have, the better we are at balancing our body fat composition. This means that brown fat helps us from gaining belly fat.
White fat is what we carry in excess. It shows up mostly around the belly. It also accumulates on thighs and buttocks and on the upper arms.
Losing belly fat therefore means losing white fat. Having more brown fat would make this easier. Laboratory research shows how to get mice to make more brown fat and less white fat. However, we do not yet know how to do this in humans. Drug companies are already looking for miracle drugs that will make this happen. They haven’t found any such thing yet.
Steps To Take About Body Fat
It is easy to measure your total body fat composition. Body fat percentage may be a little misleading, depending on how you measure it. Three main ways to to so offer different levels of accuracy.
The most accurate is the submersion test, where your buoyancy in water is used to calculate body fat percent. The second most accurate method is through impedance devices. These are now available as bathroom scales that read body fat and as handheld devices that use the same principle. In my personal experience, my handheld impedance device measures about 3 percent higher than does the submersion method.
The least accurate method is the caliper method. It varies tremendously because the strength of pinching varies with the examiner.
No single body fat percent is ideal for everyone. Good health and fat management spans a range of body fat composition. Recommended percentages of body fat are higher for women. They are also higher with age.
General agreement among nutrition researchers offers the following as healthy ranges of body fat percent for women and men in different age groups:
Women
20 to 40 yrs, 21 to 33 percent fat
41 to 60 yrs, 23 to 35 percent fat
61 to 79 yrs, 24 to 36 percent fat
Men
20 to 40 yrs, 8 to 19 percent fat
41 to 60 yrs, 11 to 22 percent fat
61 to 79 yrs, 13 to 25 percent fat
How high can you go? The highest that I ever measured in a client was 48 percent body fat in a woman in her 50s. Amazing! The ideal target range is the foundation for good health. Obviously, having a body fat percent above the maximum in these ranges is the key indicator of obesity and overweight.
The Other Extreme Is Low Body Fat
What about body fat that is below these values? They are not necessarily better because they are lower. In fact, optimum health depends on having enough body fat, white and brown, in the right places in your body.
Want to find out more about body fat composition, then visit Dr. Dennis Clark’s explanation of the silly number one fat loss secret for your ideal body fat percent and how easy it is for you to get it.
