Need to Lose Weight- Throw Out the Scale

December 15th, 2009 by author

Calculating Body Fat Percentage - Who Cares?

If you are going to have any chance at successfully losing weight and keeping it off then you must monitoring your progress; but this acutally has little to do with calculating your body fat percentage. Monitoring your progress is a requirement for success. When it it comes to monitoring your progress, I’m not talking about just how much you weigh and how much weight you have lost. It is important to keep in mind that multiple forms of measurement are essential. Taking several methods of measurement is truly a key to success because the human body is too complex to measure only body weight, bodyfat percentage, or biceps girth.

If you have ever set out on a journey to build muscle or losing weight then you will know it is not a linear process. Even though we would like to see steady progress, no one loses two pounds a week for 16 weeks. Maybe that is the average over the course of the entire 16 weeks, but on a week to week basis there will be periods of more weight loss, no weight loss, and occasionally weight gain. By using multiple measures of progress you will be able to objectively gauge and monitor the changes going on in your body.

Staying with the example of weight loss , consider the frustration created by using only your body weight as a measuring tool. During a week when you did not lose any weight, you might be inclined to think that your weight loss had stalled. However, if you are also monitoring your weight loss progress through girth measurements (waist, hips, etc) then you would also know that during this week of ‘no weight loss’ your waist measurement decreased by a quarter of an inch. That is great progress not a weight loss plateau.

Let’s look at the various ways you can monitor your progress.

Body Weight – Take your weight every morning and plot it on a graph. Day to Day variations are not as important as longer term trends (2-6 weeks)
Girth measurements – Taking measurements such as waist, chest, and hips are very important as they let you know more about local fat loss. Girth measurements aren’t as sensitive to meaningless day to day variation like the scale.
Skin Folds – Using body fat calipers is a simple and convenient way to monitor how much subcutaneous fat that you are losing. Don’t be concerned with body fat percentages; keeping track of skin fold changes overtimes is more useful.
Pictures – This is a classic way of monitoring your progress. I know you’ve seen tons of before and after photos. Take pictures before you start dieting. No one likes to take the before pictures but the after pictures are always fun.
Blood Markers – You will need to have your doctor oversee these but getting your cholesterol levels, fasting blood glucose, insulin sensitivity, and inflammatory status are good ways to monitor how your health improves as you lose weight.

To recap. Don’t worry so much about the scale or calculating your body fat percentage. Make sure to use all the units of measurements so that you can have a true marker of your fat loss progress.