Three Ways to Gauge Your Body Fat Percentage

Three Ways to Gauge Your Body Fat Percentage

One of the key starting points before you being dieting is to understand how much fat you want to lose. This isn't as simple as weighing yourself on a scale and saying, I want to lose 10lbs', because there is a key difference between general weight as seen on the scale and fat. You need to determine how much fat you are carrying, and then decide how much you want to drop without negatively affecting your lean body mass. One of the most important steps therefor is determining how much fat you are carrying, and toward that end there are three simple ways to do this. None of these are one hundred percent exact, but all will help you estimate where you are at body fat wise.

The first way is also the simplest. All that you have to do is stand before the mirror and look at your naked body. You should immediately be able to gauge how fat you are. If you are a skinny or athletic person, you should have trouble pinching fat between your fingers. Instead, you'll most likely get a pinch of skin. That means you are probably under 12% body fat. If you go to pinch your waist and get a nice wedge of fat between your fingers, say as thick as your thumb or twice as thick, than you are probably in the healthy 12% to 22% range. If however you are able to grab tires with your hands, than you are probably above that, and if you are truly overweight than you probably are aware that you're obese.

That method is simple, but very vague. People who want to gauge their body fat more accurately can thus far use a pair of calipers, which are a specialized tool used to measure fat around your body by taking the measure of fat folds in certain desgnated spots and then putting those numbers through a formula to find out what comes out the other end.

Finally, the third way to measure your body fat is to stand on a hydrostatic scale, which runs an electric current through your body and gauges your body fat percentage by how long it takes that current of electricity to come back to it. These are great, but they can easily be thrown off by how hydrated you are, and whether you have been to the bathroom recently.

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