Natural HealthBody Weight Vs Body Fat - What You Need to Know Before Weight Loss
I bet you use the bathroom scale to monitor your body weight. No doubt it's an easy and quick tool to use in detecting any weight gain, it can also throw you into a frenzy of fear. What if you discover that you gain 10 pounds of body weight after stepping onto the scale? Will you immediately associate the weight gain with excess body fat?
No, don't get panicky first because 10 pounds of body weight do not always equate to 10 pounds of body fat. Your bathroom scale only shows how much you weigh now - that's all. It doesn't figure out why and how the weight gain happens.
Thanks to the misinformation out there, people often confuse body weight with body fat and believe that whatever weight gain they put on must be the result of excess body fat. It's not that simple.
Ok, I see your confused look. Let me explain.
Imagine dividing your body into 2 main components: 75-85% lean body mass and 15-25% fat mass. They make up your body composition and when you add them up, you have your body weight.
As you can see, your body weight will fluctuate in accordance to changes in your body composition. Since your body undergoes changes every day, you can't expect your weight to remain the same all the time. Of course, the daily weight flux may not be significant enough to cause any real worries.
If the newly gained 10 pounds are 100% body fat, you just need to focus on losing it. Yep, what a wonderful thought. But in reality, you can't choose to lose fat only because when people gain or lose weight, they will add or reduce body fat, water and lean body mass together in varying percentages.
In order to find out what causes the variation, you got to look at lean body mass and fat mass in details.
Lean body mass refers to fat-free tissues which consists of primarily muscle tissues, bones, skin and internal organs. Most of water in your body is found in muscle tissues.
Fat mass is located in layers under the skin, muscles (in small amounts) and around internal organs, abdomen, thighs, hips and buttocks.
Each component in both lean body mass and fat mass can contribute to the extra pound. To help you understand better how each component does that, let's look at each one in more details.
Lean Body Mass
As mentioned earlier, lean body mass (LBM) refers to fat-free areas in your body. Assuming a body with 72% LBM, it can be further divided into 8.5% skin, 20.5% bones, 50% muscles and 21% remaining tissues (including organs).
Most of your organs do not grow bigger in proportion to your lean body mass or body weight. Some scientists believe that organs need to remain relatively small so as to minimize usage of body's resources and energy needs to fuel them. Hence, no matter how big you've become, we don't consider your organs as accomplices to weight gain.
What about bones?
Bone mass plays a part because you need them to support your weight. Some people are born with heavy bones while others gain more bone mass through exercises.
Surrounded by muscles, your bones are strongly linked to the muscle. When your muscles work, they exert force on bones, thereby stimulating them to grow denser or heavier which contributes to your body weight. By strengthening the bones, it also reduces your risk to osteoporosis.
So it seems that the more muscle mass you have, the stronger your bones will be. Yes, that's true, provided you gain the muscle through exercise rather than obesity. Scientists used to believe that obesity benefits bone health because overweight people usually have more muscles wrapping around the bones. On the contrary, a research by University of Missouri-Kansas City proved that increasing body fat mass decreases bone mass, for people of similar weight.
In fact, if we put 2 adults of the same weight together, the one with more fat mass is likely to own smaller bones than the one with more muscle mass.
Growth in LBM comes mainly from muscle mass since muscle tissue represents the largest single tissue component of the body. As you gain more muscle tissues and grow in size, your skin also expands to cover the additional tissues. As such, they are the ones that add on to your body weight.
We often hear people talking about muscles weighing more than fat and a person with more muscles will weigh more than another person of the same size.
How can 1 pound of muscle weigh more than 1 pound of fat? A pound is a pound, nothing more.
Actually, the correct way to say it is muscle is much denser than fat, so that it seems to weigh more by volume. Put it in another way - one pound (0.45kg) of muscle occupies only 1/3 of the space that 1 pound of fat does. Hence, for the same space that 1 pound of fat occupies, you can fill it up with 3 pounds of muscles.
If you apply this principle onto people, you'll notice that a woman with 20% fat will look slimmer than another woman with 40% fat, though they weigh the same 150 pounds.
Water
You may not feel its weight in your body but it actually contributes to about 60% body weight. Out of this 60% weight, 72% of it is found in your lean body mass.
With such significant impact on your body weight, we must examine water in more details.
Calories that don't get used right away are stored as glycogen in liver and muscles. Glycogen attracts large amount of water (about 3-4g per gram of glycogen), which accounts for the weight. Glycogen releases water during its breakdown. The more glycogen you used up, the more water (and pounds) you'll lose. The same goes for metabolizing of protein.
That explains why you experience rapid weight loss through calorie-restricted diets because you lose more water weight readily in the beginning when burning your stores of glycogen and protein as fuel.
But the water loss is temporary and it gets replaced as fast as they're displaced. Once you start eating normal again and replenish the water stores in your body cells, you will gain it all back.
Water loss is most prominent in athletes in terms of sweat loss during their training. In fact, they need to drink 2 cups of water to replace every pound of sweat loss. Interestingly, I read about how athletes are encouraged to weigh themselves before and after exercise sessions in order to estimate their fluid needs.
Water retention, aka edema, can also lead to weight gain. Being a common problem with obesity, it often involves eating too much salty food that causes the sodium level in your body to rise. Consequently, it prompts you to drink more water because you feel thirsty and your body holds onto the water so as to dilute the sodium in your body.
By reducing your sodium intake and increasing your activity level, your body should be able to flush out the excess water. Yep, I admit it's easier said than done for we often consume foods unaware of hidden sodium content, even for processed natural foods. Hence, we may take in too much sodium unknowingly. Nonetheless, we must continue to be vigilant in our food choices, drink adequate water and exercise regularly. Every effort counts.
A calorie-restricted diet (especially if you eat less than 1,200 calories a day for long periods) will also aggravate the water retention problem as you may not have enough protein to draw excess water out of your tissues. Again, this shows another side effect of crash diets.
Furthermore, many women experience water retention caused by hormonal changes during menstrual cycle or pregnancy. Standing or sitting in one position for long periods will cause water retention in legs too. Such retentions are common, temporary and reversible.
But when you notice that your water retention doesn't seem normal, like getting more severe or prolonged, it may indicate more serious problems relating to your kidneys, liver, heart, lung or thyroid. You should consult a specialist immediately.
Body fat
Fat beneath the skin (subcutaneous fat) typically represents most of the body fat you carry. The rest are found around internal organs and LBM. Yes, LBM also contains a small amount of structural fat for building of cells, hormones and brain components.
Since fat is spread throughout your body, how do you measure body fat mass?
Doctors often use body fat calipers to measure the width of skin fold at different parts of your body. They then insert the values into a formula or compare against a special chart, to derive your body fat percentage. By multiplying the percentage of your body weight, you get your body fat weight.
Although some health experts question the accuracy of calipers (afterall, the doctor's skill in using the calipers correctly does matter!), doctors still consider them as an easy, quick and cheap way to make the first assessment on body fat.
Alternatively, you may favor an electronic body fat scale for more accuracy than calipers. In fact, you can find many sophisticated scales in the market today that provides total fat by weight and percentage, safely in split seconds (but their accuracy is still a question).
The dietary fat you eat, like butter, vegetable oils and animal fats, slip into your fat tissues with ease because they're already in a form resembling closely to body fat. That's why it takes little effort (3 calories of energy) for your body to turn 100 calories of dietary fat into body fat.
Surprisingly, your body fat not only comes directly from dietary fat intake but also indirectly from conversion of excess carbohydrate (carb) or protein. But because it takes more energy (23 calories) to turn 100 calories of carb into fat, your body won't do it unless its glycogen storage is full.
Oh yes, your body has a limited capacity to store glycogen. If you don't burn off the glycogen fast enough and continue to eat carb, your body has no choice but to turn the excess carb into fat. Here's the terrifying part: your body doesn't put a stop to fat storage. It just keeps packing them into fat cells once glycogen storage limit is reached.
Similarly, converting protein into fat is inefficient. In any case, your body won't consider turning protein into fat as priority since its main role is in building and repairing the lean tissues. Still, if eaten in abundance such as in the case of Atkins Diet, excess protein can be made into fat.
For a healthy body fat range, women should maintain between 14% and 24% while men have a lower range of 6% to 17%.
If you exceed the healthy level, you're stressing your body with unnecessary fat, as one pound of fat gained requires another 30-50 feet of blood vessels to keep it active. For that extra load, each heartbeat needs to pump blood 30-50 feet further. Not to mention other health risks relating to heart, blood pressure and diabetes.
And of course, extra body fat distorts your body shape and size, thereby creating another set of problems for you.
Having analyzed all the possible reasons above, the cause of your weight gain may not solely due to one reason. But at the very least, you now understand that one pound of weight gain will not equal to one pound of fat.