Body Composition Is King – Quit Freaking Out About Your Weight
Posted by Brad Campbell
8
Jan, 2010
An Advanced Fat Loss Blog Post Discussing Body Composition…by Brad Campbell
Happy “fat hater Friday” TopFatLossTrainer hard-bodies. I hope everyone’s been hella productive this week so you can kick back, enjoy a cheat day and have some fun this weekend. One thing you shouldn’t do, however, is step foot on that bathroom scale.
As a fat loss specialist, one of my biggest pet-peeves is when people habitually weigh themselves, sometimes multiple times a day, on the damn scale.
There are so many reasons you should STOP freaking out about your “weight” and start concerning yourself with “body composition” instead. I’m sure you’ve heard the term body composition before, but do you really understand what it means and why it’s king when it comes to tracking your fat loss and muscle building progress?
Actually, before I get into body composition and why it’s important, let me explain why too much focus on overall body weight is counterproductive, misleading and sometimes dangerous.
The problem with weighing yourself on a scale and looking only at the amount of weight you’ve gained or lost is that it’s way too vague. Because the human body is made up of so many different components, it’s impossible to tell whether the scale’s reading is good, bad or indifferent.
Most people only consider fat and muscle weight, but what about blood, water, organs, bones, etc? Granted, most of these components wouldn’t change much, if at all, but the amount of water in your body changes significantly from day to day.
If you hop on the scale and it says you lost 2 lbs in a day, that sounds good…but it really depends on WHAT exactly you lost. Some of that 2 lbs could have been body fat, but all 2 lbs could just have easily been water.
And with inadequate dieting that is low in protein, combined with a workout plan that ignores weight training, many dieters also see loses in lean muscle mass. In a worst case scenario, a 2 lb loss according to the scale may really be a 1/2 lb increase in body fat, with a 2 lb loss in water weight and a 1/2 lb loss of precious, fat-burning muscle mass.
In this example, you’d think your diet and workout plan is kicking ass because you lost 2 lbs in only one day. But in reality, you gained fat and hurt your metabolism slightly by losing muscle tissue. Do you see how focusing on (only) body weight can be misleading and dangerous?
—> This is the exact reason why my site is called Top Fat Loss Trainer and NOT Top Weight Loss Trainer. I help people lose FAT, not weight. In fact, I could care less how much weight someone loses – tell me how much “fat” they’ve lost or how much “muscle” they’ve gained and we’re in business.
Many people get tricked by the evil scale because it causes them to draw inaccurate conclusions about how well (or not so well) their fat loss diet and workout regimen is doing for them.
A better approach is to use body composition analysis, along with body weight, to get a clearer picture of what’s going down.
Body composition analysis more specifically looks at what exactly you’re gaining or losing when you get on the scale. In general, we divide the body into either fat mass or lean body mass.
Fat mass is obvious – this would include all forms of fat within your body (most common types are subcutaneous and visceral).
Lean body mass is everything else. Clearly, we want to have the smallest amount of fat mass and the largest amount of lean body mass possible.
So how do you figure out your body composition? First, you determine your body fat percentage. After that, you just take your body fat percentage as a decimal and multiply this by your body weight, to get your total fat mass.
For example, a 150-lb female (68.2 kg) with 23% body fat would have a fat mass of: 150-lb x 0.23 = 34.5 lbs (or 15.68 kg) of fat mass.
Then, to get lean body mass, just subtract fat mass from total weight: 150-lb – 34.5 lbs (of fat mass) = 115. 5 lbs (or 52.5 kg) of lean body mass.
From here, we can calculate someone’s goal weight, based off these body composition numbers. To determine how much you should weigh to get to a certain level of body fat percentage, you just take your lean body mass and divide that by how much lean mass you’d like to have.
—> Say our 150-lb girl wants to get down to 15% body fat level. We calculated her lean body mass above to be 115.5 lb (or 52.5 kg). If she wants to get to 15% body fat, this means she wants to have 85% lean mass (100% – 15% = 85%)…still with me?
—> We take her lean body mass of 115.5 lb (or 52.5 kg) / 0.85 (her new goal for lean body mass) = 135.9 lbs (or 61.76 kg). Her goal weight would be about 136 lbs or 61.8 kg.
—> To reach this goal of 15% body fat, she’d need to lose 14.1 lbs (or 6.4 kg)
By tracking these body composition numbers, we’ll have a much better understanding of what a weight gain or weight loss actually means. This is CRUCIAL to making necessary adjustments to the diet plan and exercise routine.
If this sounds too complicated, trust me, it’s not that bad if you just follow along with the example calculations I laid out for you.
The main takeaway point of this advanced fat loss post is to learn what the scale tells us, which is almost nothing, when it comes to tracking your weight loss or muscle building progress.
Also, I hope you understand now why the scale can jump so much from day to day (water levels, especially with females during menstruation, changes in lean muscle mass, etc) AND how it can be dangerous to judge your meal plan and workout effectiveness based off body weight alone.
Using the scale to measure body weight IS important, but only when used in conjunction with more telling body composition numbers, like I outlined in the examples above. Even when used with a detailed body composition analysis, I wouldn’t recommend weighing yourself any more often than once every week.
When you do weigh yourself, do it under the exact same conditions every single time. For example, if you’re going to weigh yourself once weekly, do it every Saturday morning after waking up and peeing, but BEFORE eating or drinking.
If you choose to use the scale more frequently than this, under different circumstances, or without using body composition analysis…you’re asking for lots of confusion, frustration and most likely, eventual failure in your fat loss or muscle building goals.
By the way, I’ll be doing a post in the near future on the different ways to measure body fat percentage, as this is needed to determine your fat mass, lean body mass, goal weight and some other variables, like protein intake.
Your Coach,
Brad Campbell
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