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.