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Importance of Body Fat vs Body Weight

The best way to tell whether your diet, fitness, or other weight management programs are working for you is to keep track of changes in your body fat composition. Imagine that you weigh 200 lbs on Earth and are 35 percent body fat. On the moon you would instantly lose about 167 lbs because of lower gravity. However, your body would still be 35 percent fat.

Fat is the problem, not weight.

Calculating Body Fat and Kinds of Fat

Two kinds of fat, brown fat and white fat (i.e., adipose tissues), plus cell membrane fat, make up your|fb92abd419319ca51586292ef9ebb63f fat composition. There is no way to know how much of each kind makes up your total body fat.

Brown fat is the new kid on the block for fat loss. At one time it was thought to be present only in infants. Recent research shows its presence in adults. It occurs mostly in the upper chest area and around the neck. The importance of this discovery is that the more brown fat you have, the more able you are to balance other types of fat. Brown fat directs the metabolism of that awful belly fat that most folks want to lose.

You can easily tell when you have abnormal fat made of white adipose tissue, because it sticks out somewhere. The usual places are belly, thighs and buttocks, and 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

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.

Buoyancy in water offers the most accurate method. This involves specialized equipment for underwater weighing. Impedance devices, such as those in bathroom scales, are the next most accurate. Handheld devices that use this method are also available. On average these devices read about 3 percent higher than does the submersion method.

Calipers provide the least reliable data. Calculations of body fat percent based on pinching with calipers relies too heavily on the strength and accuracy of the examiner.

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

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.