Tuesday 17 March 2009

Well fatty...time to lose some weight

I'm taking part in (what I think is) a pretty cool study at the moment, to compare the body fat measurements from a new bio-electric impedance device against my actual body fat (as measured by X-Ray and MRI). I done the first part of it yesterday and I'll be doing the MRI tomorrow morning.

The results from yesterdays examination was the following (from memory but will be getting a report in the next month or so):
  • I weight 111.5kg (weigh in this morning had me at 109.55kg so my scales is probably off)
  • My body fat percentage is 27.7% - can't remember which device took this measurement or if it was the average.
  • My Bone Density is pretty high - think the value 3.4 was mentioned and the guy said it's the second highest he'd seen.
  • I look fat on an x-ray :)
The body fat percentage is probably the most interesting part of this ... according to those figures, my body contains almost 31kg of body fat. Now assuming I lost EVERY single kilo of this, that'd put my weight down at 80.5kg which equates to a BMI of 23.77 (I'm 1.84cm tall). Considering elite male athletes only get down to around the 6% - 13% mark, then it looks extremely unlikely that I'd every get into the "normal" BMI range (18-25).

I'm not going to get into a debate about BMI, just to say this doesn't really bother me - it's absolutely great as a risk factor for populations but individual results may vary - maybe my high bone density means I actually am big boned :)

So, if I aim for the lower end (18%) of the fitness category described on the wiki article, then I've got 13.2kg's of body fat to lose (using the formula M x (A - D)/(1-D), where M = current mass, A = actual body fat percentage (as a decimal) and D = desired body fat percentage). That puts my target weight at 98.3kg (BMI = 29.03) - a good target :)
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4 comments:

Matthew James Stanham said...

Interesting indeed. I always figured you for about 200 lbs as an ideal weight, but 98 KG suggests 220 lbs, must be those dense bones! As it goes, I found an old picture of you and Phil from Maki's graduation the other day. Do you know what weight you were back then?

18 March 2009 at 11:14
Andrew is getting fit said...

The thing is, you don't lose just fat - you lose muscle, skin, bones etc. as well. So it is possible to get below that BMI if you really cared about it. Personally it's interesting but I'm not too bothered by BMI anymore.

18 March 2009 at 21:42
Chris said...

Matt, funny old picture there - wierd seeing myself with a shaved head! The lightest I've been since you've known me is about 102kg (height of football season, summer of 2002) and I definitely had a bit (lets say a stone) to lose then. That's always been my aim and fits in with my goal weight, but it's defo a case of 1kg at a time.

19 March 2009 at 00:28
Chris said...

Andrew - totally agree with everything you said. I pay very little attention to BMI - I was just mentioning it as an (counter) observation.

Good point about the muscle \ skin ... hadn't really though about that.

19 March 2009 at 00:30

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