Healthy Weight Loss Advice - Understanding Body Composition

May 15th, 2008

It doesn’t matter what you weigh. Height and weight charts are meaningless. What really matters is the making of your body - how much of your body is muscle and how much is fat. An understanding of body composition is one of the ways you’ll escape the gravitational pull of the viands mentality. Body composition is a much more sophisticated way to see your system. Forget the scales and the height and weight charts. Concentrate on body composition.

Body literary work testing measures how lean your body is. Remember, getting lean means to enhance your lean consistency mass - your muscles, your bones, your organs and the fluids of your carcass. Body composition is the only accurate way to measure how lean you are.

We have a real challenge in this country. We live in the fattest nation on earth. The mean proportion American male is 26% stem fat. The average American female is 36% thickness fat. Let’s put that in perspective. If this average male with 26% body fat weighs 200 pounds, it means he’s carrying around 52 pounds of fat. Fat is entire weight. Every pound of fat adds 7 miles to your circulatory system. Your body stores your toxins in your fat cells. The more fat you have on your body, the more toxic your body is.

Example. A person who is 50 pounds over his or her ideal body weight has a risk of cancer that is 18 times higher than the amount to. According to cutting opening research performed at Tufts University Medical School, the best single indicator of whether you’re aging successfully is your body fat percentage. The leaner you are, the more successfully you stage of life. You can’t be too lean.

According to exercise physiology research what should your body composition subsist? Men should be 15% body fat or less regardless of age. Women should be 22% body fat or less regardless of maturity.

Fifteen percent trunk fat for men and 22% material part fat for women will put you into good to very good health. What if you want excellent health? What if you want to have being as healthy as you could possibly have being? For male athletes or men who want excellent health, the range is 6 to 12% - regardless of age. For women it’s 12 to 18%.

How do you measure body arrangement? There are various methods. Hydrostatic weighing is the gold standard of body composition testing. It’s the most faithful, only not very practical. Skin fold calipers are nearly in the same proportion that accurate, a lot more practical, and a lot more comfortable for you.

Fat is stored in 3 different areas of our body. Subcutaneously - which is betwixt the skin and the muscle. Intramuscularly - which is within the muscle (otherwise known as marbeling in steak). And, betwixt your organs.

To obtain your carcass composition, it will be necessary to measure the thickness of your skin fold in 7 contrasted locations on your body using a skin fold caliper. It will very accurately measure the thickness of your skin fold in millimeters. These numbers will be entered into a very complex mathematical formula that has been developed by exercise physiology research.

What will you learn? You’ll learn your body fat percentage which is a relationship between the sum of fat you have compared with your lean trunk mass. You’ll learn how many pounds of your total body weight are fat. And how many pounds are lean body mass. And you’ll learn your true ideal consistency weight. How is that calculated? The computer will take your lean thickness mass (your fat free weight) and tag to that the optimal amount of mortal fat 15% if you’re a guy. 22% if you’re a gal. Now you have your true ideal trunk weight based on your individual and not some height and weight chart.

Remember, you won’t always lose weight every week. But this is where the measurements really help. If you don’t lose weight, but your measurements get smaller, you’ve gotten leaner. Research reported on ABC-TV NEWS showed that adding just 5 pounds of muscle and maintaining it for one year automatically burns 91,250 calories! And burning 91,000 calories translates to losing at the same time that much for example 26 pounds!

Remember, if you gain one pound of muscle and lose one pound of fat, your weight hasn’t changed, but you’re leaner.

Article Source: http://pittsburghtemple.org