Greg's Running Blog

I have been at my fat loss endeavor for over 22 weeks now and I have been very meticulous, some might call it anal,  with my measurements and logs. I have been measuring my body fat percentage from day one using a Homedics SC-540 Scale. It has served me well and it showed I had 38.7% body fat when I started and I went all the way down to 22.3% as of today. I have also been charting my lean body mass based on weight and fat percentage. My lean body mass has changed from 145.3 lbs (65.9 kg), 61.3% of 237 lbs, to 139 lbs (63 kg), 77.7% of 176.6 lbs. It means that while I have lost 60 lbs of total weight, 6.3 lbs of it, about 10%, was lean mass instead of fat.

If you look at my lean body mass chart, it was holding steady for a while then all of a sudden it started to drop.

If you compared it to my weight loss chart it made it look like I was loosing a ton of lean body mass.

But what a lot of people have probably failed to realize was that the two charts weren’t drawn on the same scale. My lean body mass loss looks a lot less once you draw the chart to match the weight loss scale.

Things look a lot better. A lot less drastic and severe now. 10% is still 10% and I felt really bummed about losing all that muscle coming down with the weight. I felt I had done everything I could to keep the muscle on; I ate plenty of protein, I had done strength training which would signal your muscles not to go anywhere and most of my cardio was low intensity that was in the optimal range for fat burning. There just simply wasn’t much else I could have done better to retain more muscle mass.

But there is a difference between muscle mass and lean body mass. Lean body mass includes your organs, ligaments connecting tissues as well as muscles. And if I look at my weight lifting stats I can lift the same amount of weight that I could when I started. I can actually lift a bit more now than I could at the beginning. This would indicate that my muscles have at least the same amount of strength that they had before. They might be doing it in a smaller package but when it comes to muscles usually bigger is needed for more power. So I wasn’t even sure that I lost muscle mass or whether the scale was playing games with me and was starting to be inaccurate.

My scale has a normal mode and an athlete mode. And per the user’s manual this is what defines an athlete:

An athlete is considered a person who does 10 hours or more per week of aerobic activity and has a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute. These individuals should select Athlete Mode for the most accurate results. The Athlete Mode is available only for adults 18 years of age or older.

That is a pretty strict definition of an athlete and I really wonder how they came up with this definition. Since I only do 5 hours of aerobic activity a week I don’t quite qualify to be called an athlete avan if my resting heart rate is in the 40s. But I wouldn’t consider myself sedentary either. Just out of curiosity I had changed my scale to athlete mode and it showed my body fat percentage as 8.9%. That number was clearly way off.

If you know anything about body composition you should know that anything under 10% will get you to show off some sort of six-pack. I definitely don’t have a six-pack. So am I 22% body fat still? The mean body fat percentage in America for adult males is 21%. The 22% I’m at would indicate that I’m actually still fatter than the average American male which I found harder and harder to believe. So I had to get a second opinion.

A co-worker of mine took me to his gym on Monday and introduced me to a personal trainer who does body composition measurements with a 7 fold caliper measurement. She was very nice and took me completely by surprise as most of the personal trainers I had met before left me greatly unimpressed. But not her. She was very down to Earth, I really felt she was the kind of trainer that really cared about her clients and she wanted them to truly succeed and not just have them keep going back for more training sessions. She and I talked more about food and nutrition than exercising which was a great sign as most trainers would focus on machines and how to use them but she focused a lot on diet which I think a lot of folks need help with.

She took my weight, I clocked in at 179lbs in clothes, took tape measurements all over my body then did the caliper measurements with a Polar BodyAge system. The caliper and scale are all hooked up directly to a computer, there is no user input for the numbers; the caliper reads the numbers and sends them over to the machine automatically. It shows the exact location where each skinfold measurement should be taken from and all it takes is a button push to get the readings. It was a pretty neat setup.

My hip to waist ratio was 0.89 which was in the normal range meaning I’m normal and fit. It made me feel really good and I giggled a bit to myself. My dimensions were all symmetrical between left and right side with the exception of my forearms, my left one was a quarter inch larger than the right. She said it could be extra fat I carry on the left due to being right handed.

Then the time came to see my fat percentage number: 15.4% with 151 lbs of lean body mass. That is a whopping 8% less than I thought I was and a good 12 lbs more muscle mass than I anticipated! I could not believe it! I had to ask her about the measurement. Am I really that lean? Am I really at 15.4%? She said yes. She said just looking at me she would have put me there and the numbers just confirm it. I was ecstatic! That’s 12 lbs (5.5kg) less I need to lose! If I can trust the initial BF% from my scale, which I think was a lot closer to the truth than the current one, it would mean that not only I retained all my muscle I have actually gained another 5 lbs of it while I lost all the fat.

So while the scale was a great tool to track trend it is not a really good indicator when it comes to body fat percentage the closer I’m getting to my goal. I think I will stop worrying about fat percentages from now on, especially from my scale and I will start concentrating on losing the pounds and making sure I look right in the mirror. I’m just tickled pink about my result, it really made my day!