Month: July 2015

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DEXA vs Calipers for Body Fat Estimation

Since the beginning of my career I’ve emphasized the importance of paying attention to body composition over body weight alone.  In most of my books I tend to base diet set up on body fat percentage as well as that determines a lot about someone’s physiology.  But my numbers are generally based on older methods, primarily caliper measurement.  And in that DEXA is becoming more common, I want to look at DEXA vs calipers for body composition measurement.

DEXA vs Calipers, etc.

One of the more recent approaches to measuring body composition is DEXA (Dual-Energy X-ray Absorbitometry) which does a full-body scan and can measure things like bone density (critical for women) and other tissues.  And it gives what is proposed to be a more accurate estimate of BF% than older methods.  It can even do something where it gives you one value for upper body and one for lower body.… Keep Reading

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Bipolar Recovery Update 6

So it’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these and, since I can’t really come up with anything else to write about at the moment, it seemed like a good time to do another bipolar update.  The last one of these was done quite some time back so it’s really overdue.  You can find all of my other bipolar updates here.  But I’m not going to recap everything over and over again even if it pads out the word count.

The Bipolar Itself

I’ve mentioned previously that both my hypomania and depression tend to be excruciatingly seasonal.  I have typically ramped up around April/May (when the weather changes I think) and sink back down in November (when the weather changes and I run out of gas from hypomania).

The good of this is that I’m at least better able to watch out for impending signs; at the same time it made approaching that time a bit terrifying.… Keep Reading

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Body Fat, EA or Hormones

This is another excerpt from The Women’s Book, looking a bit at the cause of menstrual cycle dysfunction and, specifically, secondary amenorrhea.  Even more specifically it looks at the cause of that dysfunction as it occurs in exercising women.  Early theories revolved around body fat percentage although it would turn out that energy availability (EA) played a much larger role.

Some Definitions

Since this is a short excerpt from a much longer chapter, I want to define a few terms so it will make sense.

When a woman is menstruating “normally” this is called eumenorrhea (“eu” = good).  In contrast, the lack of a menstrual cycle is termed amenorrhea.

Primary amenorrhea is when the onset of menstruation (called menarche) is delayed.  As frequently as not this occurs in females involved in sports such as gymnastics, ballet, ice skating and other sports that “emphasize thinness” (as the literature puts it).  Their intense training and dieting simply delay the normal onset of menstruation.… Keep Reading