How to measure fat

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Body composition is the breakdown of your body make-up, ie fat, lean muscle, bone and water content. The percentage of body weight that is “essential fat” is around 4% of body weight for men and 10% for women. Beyond that, there’s a somewhat wide range of what is considered a healthy percentage of body fat. Most recommendations show a healthy range for men as 10-25 % body fat and for women 15-30%. Keeping track of your body composition is an important tool to monitor your wellness.

Do muscles weigh more than fat?
No, muscles do not weigh more than fat, any more than lead weighs more than feathers. A pound is a pound and a kilo is a kilo. However, muscles are much more dense than fat, so, by volume, a muscle seems to weigh more. So by increasing your muscle mass you will look thinner.
Muscle is also active tissue, in that any muscle you build from exercise will be active all day long in burning more calories.

So how do I know if I carry too much fat?
A body composition scale tells you just that.
Your total weight is a combination of bone, ligament, tendon, organs, fluids, muscle and fat. This is what a traditional scare will measure. A body composition scale tells you your “body composition” which is defined as the relationship between all the lean tissue in the body and fat. It is not uncommon that a person who starts a new exercise program will not see any effect on the standard scale but a great difference on the body composition scale.

Body Mass Index

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measurement of body fat based on height and weight that applies to both men and women between the ages of 18 and 65 years. BMI will give you an indication if your weight is normal of if you’re overweight.
A BMI between 18,5 and 25 is considered as normal weight. This table shows the classification:

18.5 or less	Underweight
18.5 to 24.99	Normal Weight
25 to 29.99	Overweight
30 to 34.99	Obesity (Class 1)
35 to 39.99	Obesity (Class 2)
40 or greater	Morbid Obesity

This is how you calculate your BMI.
English BMI Formula
BMI = ( Weight in Pounds / ( Height in inches ) x ( Height in inches ) ) x 703
Metric BMI Formula
BMI = ( Weight in Kilograms / ( Height in Meters ) x ( Height in Meters ) )

Waist circumference
Waist circumference is the distance around your natural waist (just above the navel). This measurement is very important since body fat that accumulates around the waist and stomach area poses a greater health risk than fat stored in the lower half of the body. Waist circumference can be useful for those people categorized as normal or overweight in terms of BMI.
Your goal for waist circumference is less than 40 inches or 101 cm if you’re a man and less than 35 inches or 89 cm if you’re a woman.

Skin fold measurement
Another way of tracking body fat is through a skin fold measurement. The measurement is taken on 3 to 9 different sites around the body. The waist is of course one of them. For consistency the right side is usually only measured. The tester pinches the skin at the appropriate site to raise a double layer of skin and the underlying loose tissue, but not the muscle. The calipers are then applied to make the actual measurement. The mean of two measurements should be taken. If the two measurements differ greatly, a third should then be done, then the median value taken. A skin fold measurement is best to be use to track the progress in body composition during an exercise/diet or weight loss program. The same measurements are done and recoded on a regular basis to track results.

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