Importance of Body Fat 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.

Types and Amounts of Body Fat

Now it gets a little dicey, because there is no way to know how much of the different kinds of fat are in your body. Your total consists of brown fat and white fat (both referred to as adipose tissues), and even cell membrane fat.

Brown fat has received the most attention in research recently. The most exciting new discovery is that adults have plenty of it, not just babies as previously believed. In fact, adults can carry plenty of brown fat in the upper chest and around the neck. The excitement about this discovery is because brown fat helps to regulate fat metabolism in general. This means that the more brown fat you have, the easier it is to keep from gaining white fat around your belly.

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.

Nevertheless, there is an ideal range of body fat percent for good health and weight (fat) control. No single number is an ideal percent for everyone. In fact, numbers are always lower for men than for women. In addition, body fat normally goes up 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

Obesity and overweight are considered to be above these ranges. These are the target values for optimum health and fitness. It is amazing how much body fat some people can carry above the maximum value. The highest body fat percent that I ever measured in one of my clients was 48 percent. This was for a woman in her 50s. Incredible!

Lower Body Fat Percent Is Not Healthier

What may not be so obvious is that numbers below these health ranges are not necessarily healthier just because they are lower. You need body fat in the right amounts, of the right types, in the right places for optimum health and body image.

Looking to find the easiest way to change your body fat composition, then visit BellyFatScience.com to find Dr. Dennis Clark’s the best advice on reducing body fat percent and how you can use the best secret of all.

categories: fat loss, weight loss, health, fitness, medicine