Difference Between Weight vs Body Fat
Managing weight is not the important detail. Managing fat is what you are after. For example, if you weigh 200 lbs and have 35 percent body fat, your body fat would stay the same even if you were on the moon. In fact, you would weigh about 167 lbs fewer and still be 35 percent body fat.
The point here is that weight is not the issue. Fat is.
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.
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.
When you have too much white fat, it shows mostly as too much fat around your belly. White fat also adds up easily on buttocks and thighs and on upper arms.
White fat is therefore the fat that you want to lose. Ideally, you would even make more brown fat to help you lose white fat. Scientists have been able to get mice to to this in laboratory experiments. Nobody yet knows how to make this happen in humans. Pharmaceutical companies are, of course, working hard to discover a new drug that will do it for you. Nothing along this line is yet available.
Advice About Body Fat
Keep in mind that measuring total body fat can be misleading, even though it is currently the best indicator of body fat composition. The accuracy of the main three methods of measurement varies.
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
These are the target ranges for good health. It is probably obvious that being above these ranges is the foundation for overweight (i.e., overfat) and obesity. There may be no limit to how high it can go. One of my clients, a woman in her 50s, measured at 48 percent body fat. Wow!
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.
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.
