What Is a Healthy Body Fat Percentage?
When you're trying to lose weight, the more you know about the composition of your body, the more successful you are likely to be. Understanding your body fat percentage and what it means can help you set smart weight loss goals and ultimately achieve the body you want.
The Facts
Body fat percentage is exactly what it sounds like: the percentage of fat in your body. A 100-pound woman with 10 percent body fat has 10 pounds of fat.
BMI, or body mass index, a common measurement for determining healthy body weight, is not the same thing as body fat percentage. Instead of measuring fat directly, BMI measurements use a person's height and weight to estimate a person's body fat.
Considerations
Keep in mind that fat isn't all bad. Though the goal of weight loss is often to get rid of as much fat as possible, your body needs fat to perform many of its life-supporting functions, including storing energy, regulating your body temperature and cushioning your vital organs. Letting your body fat percentage drop too low is as potentially dangerous to your long-term health as having a too-high body fat percentage.
Recommendations
The American Council on Exercise recommends a 25 to 31 percent body fat percentage for women and an 18 to 25 body fat percentage for men. (Women naturally have more fat than men because of their reproductive systems.)
For athletes, who have a higher ration of lean muscle mass to body fat, the American Council on Exercise recommends a body fat percentage of no lower than 20 percent for women and no lower than 13 percent for men.
Methods
The two most common ways to measure body fat percentage are the skin-fold measurement and the bioelectrical impedance analysis.
In the skin-fold measurement, an instrument called a caliper is used to "pinch" the amount of fat at certain designated spots around the body. The results are then analyzed to determine body fat percentage. The more experienced the person wielding the calipers, the more accurate the measurement will be.
Bioelectrical impedance analysis uses an electrical current to measure the body's total amount of water, a number that makes it possible to estimate total body fat. Most body fat percentage scales and other systems available for consumers use this technology for their calculations.
Other methods of measuring body fat percentage, such as X-ray analysis and water displacement, give very accurate results but can be complicated to perform and expensive.
Solutions
To lower your percentage of body fat, you need a combination of diet and exercise. High-energy cardiovascular exercise, such as running and aerobics, burns calories, which burns fat; combine it with activities that build lean muscle mass to increase your lean body mass percentage. Reducing your overall daily calorie intake and eating a healthy diet also positively impacts your total body fat percentage.
Tags: body percentage, your body, American Council, American Council Exercise, body mass, body percentage