Body fat refers to the amount of fat your body contains. Your body needs some fat to be healthy.
It can be accurately assessed by highly scientific methods in laboratories, but these are cumbersome and expensive.
An easy approximation of body fat can be done by measuring the thickness of folds of skin (and the associated fat beneath) at various places around your body.
These measures can be used in a variety of formula to give an indication of the total level of fat in your body. This level of fat is usually expressed as percentage, that is, the percentage of your body mass that is composed of fat. This is often referred to as % body fat or body fat %.
Calculating % body fat is useful in many ways.
- it gives us an indication of change i.e. has this increased or decreased?
- do we have to adjust the program because of these results?
- if it has changed, it can be a very motivating experience
- it can show if changes in body weight are due to fat loss or loss of muscle tissue
- many common approaches to weight loss don't reduce body fat. They just make you weigh less by depriving you of food, reducing your muscle mass or ridding the body of water (all will make you weigh less!)
- we can use the result to calculate other factors
- Your lean body mass, LBM, the amount of bone, tissue and organ mass. This can indicate if there has been changes in the amount of muscle you have, and can account for variations in scale weight.
- LBM can be used to assess the amount of enegy you need each day
- Your optimal body mass, OBM. This is your body mass given your current LBM and a change in your % body fat to an optimal level. This is very useful for assessing if your objectives can be achieved.
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Regards Kym
