You can’t look in the mirror and figure out your body fat weight. And believe it or not, the percentage of your body fat is a good thing to know if you’re on a serious quest to lose weight. You can weigh yourself, take your height measurement and figure out your BMI—your body mass index. That will determine whether or not you’re in a normal weight range, you’re overweight, or if you’re obese and should lose weight immediately. But figuring your BMI still doesn’t tell you your body fat weight and how much of your weight might be made up of muscle.
Even if you’re overweight, you can be quite muscular beneath the fat. Many people who are losing weight thanks to help from a great exercise program do build muscle as they’re losing weight. If you go solely by the scales, this can be a discouraging thing at times. Muscle weighs more than fat, so if you’re building new muscles, they're adding weight to your body. You’ll weight more on the scale, your BMI will be higher, but that’s not true body fat weight.
Often if a person is exercising regularly and eating healthy, they’ll be losing body fat weight but the scale doesn’t show much progress. That’s because they’re replaced the weight they lost with muscle weight. This is to be expected when someone starts an exercise program, and it’s perfectly normal. If you just started exercising when you started dieting, don’t be discouraged on those weeks when the number on the scale doesn’t want to go down. You might have lost some weight but gained an equal mount in muscle mass.
If you’re lifting weights, especially, you’re building some muscle and that will keep your weight the same or make it go up at first. But you shouldn’t be concerned with this because muscle weight is healthy, unlike body fat weight. Muscle is an active tissue, which means it’s always using energy, always burning calories. Fat doesn’t do anything but take up space. So the more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism is and the more calories you burn. If you’re discouraged by lack of weight loss or weight gain, though, try comparing measurements to earlier ones—they’re bound to be smaller. Or pay attention to how your body feels or fits in your clothes. That’s a true measure of whether you’re still making progress, and is much more reliable than the scale.
There are ways to measure body fat weight. One way is with calipers. They look like big pinchers, or a stethoscope without the part you put on your chest. A person trained in the use of calipers will use them to painlessly pinch various parts of your bodies. It’s not a rough pinch, merely a gripping of your skin and fat between the prongs to measure it. Remember the old “Can you pinch an inch” commercial? That’s the principle behind it. How much flesh is pinched determines your body fat weight and percentage.
