Body composition
The scale and BMI are ineffective tools for gauging your overall body composition, meaning they don’t tell you enough to determine if you are at a healthy weight.
Here’s an example. A professional athlete may be six feet tall (183 cm), weigh 225 pounds (102 kg), and be in fantastic physical condition with a 32-inch waist (81 cm) and bulging muscles. A busy doctor may be six feet tall and weigh 225 pounds with a 39-inch waist (99 cm) and a bulging midsection.
They have the same weight and the same BMI, but very different health assessments. What’s different? The two men have different amounts of muscle and fat mass. The athlete has a healthy body composition. The doctor does not.
Body composition refers to the amount of fat, muscle, bone, and water that contributes to your total weight. Body composition can be expressed as a percentage (like body fat percentage) or an absolute amount (like pounds of muscle mass). Muscle, bone, and water are frequently combined and referred to as lean body mass, which differentiates them from fat mass.
As I say in my health and fitness presentations, there is a big difference between fitness and thinness! The only way to really know if you have a healthy body mass composition you must know your percentage of body fat to muscle mass.
For better health, most people want to lose fat mass and preserve or gain lean mass. Preserving muscle and bone helps prevent sarcopenia (muscle loss), frailty, and osteopenia (bone loss), in addition to improving the ability to do everyday tasks.
Higher muscle mass with lower fat mass may also be related to a lower risk of heart disease, cancer, and dementia, and may be a predictor of longevity.
For some people, improving body composition has nothing to do with losing weight. Numerous studies have called attention to the health risk of having a normal weight while also having a number of metabolic risk factors more commonly associated with obesity. This is often referred to as “normal weight obesity” or colloquially as “thin on the outside and fat on the inside (TOFI).”
Do these three things to improve your body composition:
Greatly diminish intake of sugar and carbohydrates as they spike insulin which stores fat
Getting enough protein to promote muscle growth
Doing regular strength building exercise to stimulate your muscles to build lean mass
While there is more than one way to accomplish these goals, here are the best tips, backed by science, to improve your body composition.
