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.
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.
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.
Ideally, the best fat loss would therefore be white fat loss. Indeed, better weight management would include getting your body to make more brown fat and less white fat. So far, scientists have succeeded in getting mice to do this in laboratory research. We do not yet know whether this will work in people. Of course, drug companies are seeking a new miracle drug that will do this for you. No such thing is available at the moment.
Steps To Take About Body Fat
You can measure your percent body fat in three main ways. Each method has a different level of accuracy. Keep in mind that your body fat percent will vary depending on the method of measurement.
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.
The generally accepted ranges of body fat composition for men and women based on age groups are recommended by nutrition experts as follows:
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.
Body Fat Percent Can Be Too Low
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.
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