Body Fat

A very dear friend of mine is on the journey to fitness as well, and it's tremendously encouraging to talk with him about diet, exercise, successes, failures, and so on. He mentioned his goal of losing 15% body fat, and I said I had no idea how much body fat I needed to lose - I've just been doing it by numbers.

In my head, I think I should weigh about 120-130 pounds. That's what I weighed when I was "fit" (an athlete in high school), and that seems to be consistent with my BMI and healthy weight guidelines. I had no idea if it was actually possible to lose this much weight, seeing as I have never had my body fat properly measured, but I figured it had to be possible.

My friend sent me a link to a Home Body Fat Test, which involves a few key measurements on body points with a tape measure. It returns an estimate of your body fat percentage and lean muscle mass. My friend says his results were within 2% of what his trainer had calculated with calipers, so while I took my results with a grain of salt, I am not going to totally dismiss them. Especially since they surprised the heck out of me:

Your Results

You have 26.1% body fat.

You have 46.5 Pounds of fat and 131.5 Pounds of lean (muscle, bone, body water).

I checked a linked chart of "healthy amounts of body fat," and I'm not too terribly far off from the healthy-normal range.

Of course, this test didn't consider my height at all, or my build. It didn't measure the fattest part of my upper arms or take the size of my breasts into consideration. It's possible that my numbers are totally skewed and that all my fat is lumped into places the test can't see.

Then again, it seems about right. If I have roughly 50 pounds of fat to lose, then I'll get close to the weight I was when I at at my fittest. If that is the size my body wants to be, then it's good to know it's possible to lose the weight through losing fat, rather than if I were just built really bulky and had no way of losing weight without cutting into actual structure.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm encouraged. Fitness is totally within my grasp.

The difference two inches makes

I worry sometimes about putting too much personally-identifying information on this site, since I realize it wouldn't be too difficult for someone who knows me in real life to figure out who I am by reading the entries here. They wouldn't even have to know me particularly well, but just be casually aware of my travels, daily occurrences in life, basically anything gleaned from Facebook, Twitter, or my personal blog.

That said, I like the idea of being pseudo-anonymous because it keeps me honest with myself. Part of why I started a public blog instead of a physical or private diet journal is because I wanted the accountability of my words going out into space and existing beyond me and my original intentions. I wanted all my notes and thoughts on dieting and getting fit to be documented and dated, so that I couldn't change my mind, rewrite history, or lie to myself. And to that extent, this site has been extraordinarily beneficial, so I'm definitely going to keep it up, however sporadically.

I've been inordinately busy lately with this intensive summer class that is taking up my every spare moment. I've said I'm really busy before, but I've never experienced anything like this.

That's meant abandoning swimming, which makes me really sad. I was getting pretty consistent about going at least three or four times a week, sometimes as often as five, and I was really building my speed and distance. My mother and I talked it over and agreed that it is probably best to start swimming back up again once I'm done with this class, since it's unlikely that I will suddenly master time management and come up with three hours or so a night to drive to the pool, swim, shower, dress, and drive home.

I was worried that I would begin packing on pounds again, but somehow it seems the opposite is going on. My weight had been bouncing between 180-185 (depending on water retention etc), and it is now bouncing around 177-182. Today it was 178, which made me happy, since I haven't done much besides study, stress out, and shove food in my face.

I miss the way I feel when I'm exercising regularly, though, and I feel certain I could make time for a short run here and there, or that I could start doing push-ups again (I barely made it through Week One before I went away for a conference and stopped doing them altogether). I had this vision of really knuckling down and tearing weight off this summer, and I'm afraid that I am using the stress of this class as an excuse to forget about everything else in my life.

One bright note, though, that took me completely by surprise. For years now I've been saying I'm 5'4" because that's what I was the last time I was measured. It didn't occur to me that I'd slowly grow, seeing as I'm 27 and I figured I had reached my full height. I was standing next to my mother the other day, and she measured 5'4" at her last doctor's appointment less than 6 months ago. My brother pointed out that I am most definitely taller than her, by a noticeable amount, so I remeasured myself and found I am actually somewhere between 5'5.5" and 5'6"!

This is huge for me, because I've always thought of myself as short and squat. Now it seems I am actually above average height (barely) for American women, and whatever that does for my self-esteem, I'm taking it. I really like the idea of being 5'6", and I want to get measured at my doctor to get the real number.

As a bonus, the additional two inches of height actually changes my BMI. At 5'4", 178 pounds would put my BMI at 30.6, which is classified as Obese. At 5'5.5", my BMI becomes 29.2, scraping just under the threshold for Overweight. If I'm actually 5'6", my BMI would be 28.7, still at the upper range of Overweight.

The thing is, I know that BMIs are widely dismissed as a crap gauge of health, and I know that these are all semantics and labels... but it is enormously satisfying to be just Overweight instead of Obese. Somehow the amount of weight I'd like to lose feels so much more manageable and, well, possible.

I also forgot to mention a nice little surprise at the change of seasons. I was dreading spring and summer because I didn't think I had any clothes that fit. I'd been a pretty solid size 14 for quite a while, and I hated all of my clothes, but I was really reluctant to buy any new ones because I was desperate to get out of that size. When my clothes started feeling loose, and then downright baggy, I decided to try on the summer clothes I had stored in the attic, thinking maybe I'd find a few things that fit. I was thrilled to see that actually the majority of my size 12 clothes fit, and even some of the looser-cut size 10 skirts. I haven't been able to wear these clothes since 2004, before I started dating my ex-boyfriend, and it's a weird little personal victory to be able to wear them out to work and on dates again.

I know that as with BMIs, clothing sizes aren't an indicator of your health or fitness, but if my weight isn't really changing, I need something to stay motivated. Being taller and wearing a smaller size, I feel better about myself, and it makes me double-think snacks or second helpings at dinner. That's got to help.