Frugal Couple Fitness - Measuring body fat percentage %



How many things have we tried in order to lose weight. I mean losing the bad weight (fat) and keeping the good stuff (muscles).

These are arguable and definitely some criteria could be used badly if taken to the extreme. But here's how I found using some cues can help tell if you got a lot of fat vs muscle

Good measure of good vs bad weight: the main idea here is to measure body fat %, here's a website correlating body fat % to how you'd look. This is surprisingly accurate.
Now how do you measure the body fat %?

1- visual: you can probably ballpark it just by comparing to those images, but if you want to be more accurate...
2- ultrasound: it can be used to measure fat thickness at several sites and combining those numbers, you get a pretty good idea of the body fat %. Ultrasound is not used widely for fat measurement at the gym because of cost but is being used extensively in animal meat grading (AAA vs AA depends a lot on fat level)

3- caliper: the current gold standard at the gym, for better results measure at several location and combine with formulas. The hard part is to not pinch for too long because believe it or not, fat does move around if you pinch for too long, you'll appear thinner at that site


Bad measure of good vs bad weight: These are the lazy way of doing it, but I found it didnt work for me.
1- BMI: if you work out, this will not work because it assumes the subject is sedentary
2- Scale for weight: Those can be good indicator but weight varies a lot simply if you drink a lot of coffee/booze/got-sick one day and are dehydrated. I've found my weight to vary by 10lbs (on a 180lbs base weight) easily after being sick for about 3 days. It was all water as I regained it all in the next few days.
I got mine from canadian tire... things always seem to be at 60% off

Of course, if you track your weight or pant size over a long period of time religiously, those little fluctuations will average out and you will observe the true change in your fat level, but as absolute values, they are not really what you'd want to use.

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