Body Fat Composition vs Body Weight
Diet, fitness, or other approaches to weight management miss the point. The problem is not weight management. It is fat management. For example, if you are 35 percent body fat, your body fat composition would be the same even on the moon. However, if you weigh 200 lbs on Earth, your weight would be about 33 lbs on the moon, still with 35 percent body fat.
Fat is the problem, not weight.
Calculating Body Fat and Kinds of 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.
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.
Underwater weighing offers the greatest accuracy for measuring body fat composition. This is not useful as a home test, since it requires specialized equipment. However, impedance devices for home use are available. These can be handheld devices or as part of bathroom scales that give body fat readings. In my experience, impedance measurements are about 3 percent higher than submersion measurements.
Body fat calculations based on caliper measurements are the least accurate. They depend too much on the highly variable strength of pinching from one examiner to another.
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!
Body Fat Percent Can Be Too Low
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.
Learn more about body fat composition. Stop by Dr. Dennis Clark’s site where you can find out about the simplest secret of all for reducing body fat percent that nobody else knows and what it can do for you.
