How Do You Measure your Body |
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I’ve been thinking about the tools that people use to measure their body lately. Most people have a simple bathroom scale. They step on it, it spits out a number and they determine whether they are fat or thin. Sometimes people will compare themselves to others of different heights. Just because one person looks good and healthy at 125 pounds, it doesn’t mean that another person should strive for that.
Other people use body mass index (BMI) as a tool. It’s a better indicator than just weight since it at least factors in height. However, it is far from perfect way to measure your body. It uses only two factors: your height and weight. What happens if you are a “vertically challenged”, lean, weightlifter? You’ll have a high BMI - possibly even qualify to be “obese.” However, if someone were to look at you, they’d have to conclude that you are far from obese. The problem is that this measuring simply doesn’t account for muscle weight.
Lastly, some people use body fat percentage (BF %) as a measure. I think this is the best of all three, but it’s still not perfect. One can imagine a dangerously thin person with an eating disorder. This person’s body fat percentage could be dangerously low, definitely not a sign of good health. But what would happen if they suddenly ate more and didn’t exercise? Their body fat percentage would rise to healthier levels, but chances are they’d have very little lean muscle - not a good thing.
The more I look at it, the more I think that a combination of BMI and BF % is in order. If you can toe the line between a healthy BF % while increasing your BMI, you’d be adding more muscle and not fat. This is something that I’ve been trying to do with my own health. I need to be a little more consistent in grabbing these measurements. Then I need to start plotting a 50-day moving average of them to smooth out the fluctuations that appear from day to day.
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November 22nd, 2007 at 5:43 am
I would like to measure my body fat percentage, but I don’t know of an easy way to do it. I know you can go have it done, but that takes time and expense. Stepping on the bathroom scale once a week is easy to do consistently.
Any tips for a good do-it-yourself body fat test?
November 24th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
There are a couple of options for measuring body fat. The most accurate way is by hyrdostatic weighing, but you probably can’t do that at home since you have to put yourself under water and it requires some expensive equipment.
At home, a fairly accurate way to measure body fat is with skin-fold calipers. It can take a little practice to use them, and it feels a bit funny (especially if you try doing it to yourself.) Make sure you read the directions before trying, since if you do it wrong the results are worthless.
The easiest way to measure body fat is through measuring your bioelectrical impedance. You can buy bathroom scales that you just step on and it sends a small current through your body to tell you your body fat percentage. There are a few disadvantages to using these, though. They can be a little less accurate than the other methods, you shouldn’t eat or drink or exercise for hours before using it, and if you have a body fat percentage less than 10% then you will need a pretty expensive one to get anything close to an accurate reading.
My method for measuring my health is to weigh myself daily and watch the trends as my weight goes up and down. Actually, my weight never changes; it is usually within a 3 to 5 pound range year round.
Another good method for measuring your health is to get your resting heart rate first thing in the morning every day. It’s more likely to be a useful number than BMI or weight or body fat anyway in terms of your overall health.
November 24th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Thanks Blaine. I wrote back to this reader individually and then realized that idea can be best used as a separate post. I should have mentioned that here so that it wasn’t an open ended question.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention the measuring of your resting heart rate. I think I might missed it because I was focusing on more outwardly physical metrics.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Thanks for the Body Mass Index and Height correlation to health.I had forgotten about it. Am on it.
November 27th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I use many measures:
* weight (at home) - it gives me a pretty good general idea of how I’m doing
* measurements (at home) - it gives me information about my muscle mass or fat mass, depending on what I’m measuring
* height (annually, at the doctor’s office) - tells me if I’m getting osteoporosis yet!
* body fat (at health fairs) - gives me specific numbers I can compare over time
* blood pressure (at the doctor and at grocery store machines) - a measure of my circulatory health
* resting pulse (at home) - a measure of my fitness level
* those lung capacity things they have at health fairs sometimes
* and of course all the blood tests and other tests doctors do at physicals
There’s also how I feel, like how much my muscles are aching, how much I’m panting, how hungry I am, etc.
April 19th, 2008 at 8:06 am
[...] Before I tell you about the rest of my week I would like to point you at an interesting post on BMI… I wrote a post yesterday on using the BMI calculation to determine how much weight to lose… I wrote the article knowing full well that BMI will accurately determine when I reach a normal weight… Lazy Man articulates this aspect of BMI very well in How Do You Measure your Body. [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 2:35 am
At most modern gyms they have machines to test your body fat, where you put your arm in to it, and the machine presses on your arm near your bicep. There are lots of home weighing scales that can tell you your body fat too, but im not sure how accurate this is.