Sunday, April 22, 2012

Body Fat Percentage test #1

The community on MyFitnessPal suggests roughly ignoring the BMI value for testing body fat/weight loss goals and focusing instead on Body Fat Percentage tests.

Apparently it takes a while and can be a bit expensive to get this done professionally, but you can do a simple tape measure version at home using different formulas. This was pretty easy, and the app "Fat2Fit" is pretty straightforward.

I got some interesting (and varying) results from the 3 different formulas:
"Original" Formula: 23.8%
Military Formula: 22.4%
Covert Bailey Formula: 17.5%.

This puts "lean muscle weight" at like 140-150lbs, and that's how it calculates fat on top on your lean weight. Interesting. These values are quite varying unfortunately, and since the healthy range ends at 19%, it's unclear whether I am in the healthy range yet or not. If you take an average of all the values, it's 21.2%, which is getting close.

So this data is a bit unclear but the one thing here is obvious, getting to my original goal weight of 180 lbs (very close now) is not good enough, as I suspected. My new goal to hit 170 next is a great call, and I may even push to 165 after that, though I bet that is gonna be TOUGH. Anyway, good to get a rough idea. Mostly this is just to plant a marker so I can re-test using all of these formulas again monthly and track my results more closely.

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