Body Fat Composition And Ideal Body Fat Percent
Body Fat Composition 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.
The point here is that weight is not the issue. Fat is.
Types and Amounts of Body Fat
Two kinds of fat, brown fat and white fat (i.e., adipose tissues), plus cell membrane fat, make up your total body 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.
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.
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.
Advice 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.
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.
The least accurate method is the caliper method. It varies tremendously because the strength of pinching varies with 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.
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
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!
Lower Body Fat Percent Is Not Healthier
Low body fat may seem impressive. However, you can go too low. Percentages below these ranges are not optimum for good health. The right amounts of brown fat as well as white fat, in the right places, are part of overall good health and body image.
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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