Measuring Body Composition: Part 2
Today, I want to look at methods, some of which will be repeated from Wednesday, that allow actual tracking of changes in true body composition. That is, they can be used (to some degree anyhow) to estimate actual body fat composition which can then be used, using the method in Body Composition Calculations, to determine actual fat and lean body mass and track changes.
Measuring Body Composition: Part 1
Over the next two articles, I want to look at various methods of determining ‘body composition’ (you’ll understand why I’m putting that in quotations in a second) that are available. These range from low- to high-tech and from extremely useful to useless (or at least impractical).
Body Composition Numbers
In previous articles, I’ve explained What Body Composition Means as well as showing folks how to do a variety of Body Composition Calculations. Continuing on in that theme, I want to talk a little bit about specific body composition numbers and what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ body fat percentage might actually be.
For the record, in a future article, I’ll look at various methods of measuring body composition and their pros and cons, along with giving some guidelines for how to apply them. So please be patient in the comments, all will be discussed.
Body Composition Calculations
For the time being let’s assume I have a magic wand which I can wave to determine someones body fat percentage. I want to show you how to do some basic calculations with those numbers in hand.
So I wave my wand it tells me that the 200 pound athlete standing in front of me has 10% body fat. First let’s determine what his actual body composition, in terms of pounds of lean body mass and fat are.
Is Rapid Fat Loss Right For You?
It’s taken almost as a matter of faith in the fitness world that slower rates of weight loss are superior to faster rates, that diets generating faster weight loss always cause faster rates of regain and poorer long-term results. As I’ll mention below, there is certainly some data to support that.
What Does Body Composition Mean?
However, this is all too commonly leading to confusion as people ask “What does body composition mean?”. They know that it’s important but aren’t quite sure why it’s important or what the concept is about. I want to help take some of the confusion out of the topic here.
10 Tips to Deal with Holiday Weight Gain
For the body obsessed or even normal dieters, the holiday period from around October through to January can be a true minefield. Between the specific holidays of Halloween (mercifully passed), Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with endless goody baskets and parties, folks can run into problems maintaining the habits they strive to follow the rest of the year.
Why is Stubborn Fat Stubborn?
In general there are clear gender differences that show up at puberty, suggesting that sex hormones play a role in how fat cells develop. And there is much truth to this. It turns out that if you take a fat cell from a man’s thigh and a woman’s thigh, they are functionally identical and essentially indistinguishable physiologically. Even though the man generally has extremely low levels of estrogen.
All Diets Work: The Importance of Calories
In the article All Diets Work: A Qualification I made a quick qualification regarding my original statement that ‘all diets work’; today I want to expand a bit on something I mentioned on in that article. That something is the importance of calories.
What is Body Fat?
The more technical term for body fat is adipose tissue, with individual cells being called adipocytes (adipo = fat ; cyte = cell). In humans, the primary type of fat cell is called white adipose tissue, or WAT, so named because of its color (it’s actually sort of a milky yellow). While there is another type of fat, called brown adipose tissue or BAT (which is actually reddish/orangeish), it’s generally been thought that humans didn’t have much BAT and hence it could be ignored. As I’ll discuss later, this has been brought into question by recent research. I’ll come back to BAT in the next chapter.
