Losing Weight

Transcript

In our society, the pressure to be thin is all around us. In the United States, we commonly associate thinness with youth, beauty, and strength. After the stress and imposed isolations of the 2020 COVID year, many of us are feeling particularly large, and feeling the pressure to be thin even more. We use the word thing to describe people who are undoubtedly NOT thin. We often use the word thin when we really mean “low body fat”. There’s also a cultural movement towards body acceptance, regardless of the impacts that it has on the body itself.

What we actually want, however, is “perceived health”. How people perceive health is not an exact science because of cultural influences, but it’s a more accurate way to describe what humans find attractive. Loosely described, what animals want is for other members of their species to look at them, and subconsciously judge them to be healthy. Naturally, with humans it can be more complicated, but it’s a start.

For most of us, our education about anatomy and physiology was limited to whatever was covered in the 7th grade, supplemented by articles in fitness magazines on occasion. The advice seems contradictory, confusing, and having no “right” answer.

In reality, this seems to be a case of people focusing on perfection, without understanding the natural range of human performance. We are culturally becoming attuned to the idea if you can’t be the best, there’s no reason to try. For example, many people don’t jog at all because they can’t run fast. The fastest runners can run a mile in under 4 minutes. A healthy person can walk a mile in 15 minutes. There’s a wide range of possibilities in between.

How does this apply to the goal of thinness? Thinness implies a simple lack of body mass. It’s often measured in two ways, size of clothes, and weight on a scale. However, there’s a very important reason that those are poor ways to measure perceived health. Thinness doesn’t say anything about weight or strength.

In our culture, there is often pressure to think of strength as an opposite of brains. One doesn’t need strength if one doesn’t do manual labor that requires it. Wanting to be thin is easy and absolute, but it doesn’t care whether you are gaining or losing muscle or fat, and that matters for a simple physical reason. Fat is much less dense than muscle. A pound of fat is nearly twice as large a pound of muscle. On a human body, that means you can get heavier and heavier and smaller and smaller, as fat is lost and muscle is gained. In practical terms, until you get to serious bodybuilding muscle, at the same height, and weight, a person with less body fat and more muscle is smaller than a person with more body fat.

Similarly, until you get to extremes, it’s less important how much body fat you have, and more important what percentage of body fat you have. The means just for aesthetics, what really matters is how your muscle and fat complement each other to give an overall impression of strength and health. The more muscle you have, the fat you can get away with, by mass.

Males typically need a bare minimum of 5% body fat to live, and women need 10% for basic functions. Fat stores both calories as well as critical vitamins and minerals necessary to survive without being on an IV drip constantly. “Average” healthy body fat ranges are from 18 to 24% in men, to 25% to 30% in women. Below that is a matter of personal preference, and above that body fat begins to have health implications.

When we start to think about creating an ideal body for the life we want to lead, we can start with picking a body fat percentage target. The difficult part is figuring out what the lean mass side of the percentage should be. We want our body fat percentage to be 20% of WHAT?

Many of us are tempted to pick a random number on the scale from our youth, and try to get back to that number. That line of logic leads to sacrificing lean mass in order to achieve our goals, not very ideal. Let’s look at a body, broken down into sections by weight.

Our body weight has components that change very slowly, and components that cycle relatively quickly. Slowly changing components include the skeletal system, skin, organs and nerves. Striated muscle, the muscle used for movement, changes more rapidly, and fat deposits can change most of all. What changes the most in weight in our bodies is the water that’s contained literally everywhere in the body.

There are many methods for measuring body fat percentage, and what’s left is lean mass. As a rule of thumb, about half of what’s left is muscle, and the other half is skeletal, fluids, and organs including the skin.

If that’s what a body IS, how can we come up with a goal of what we want a body TO BE? It’s surprisingly hard to calculate, although it’s becoming easier to measure. Without going to an MRI to measure body composition, new biometric impedance scales are providing more and more accurate measurements to assist.

If you know your current body fat percentage, you can estimate your lean mass, and figure out a rough goal weight by adjusting it to be your new target lean mass percentage. If a woman was 200 lbs and 60% body fat, her lean mass is only 80 lbs. That’s 70% of 115 lbs, so 115lbs with 30% body fat might be their goal, and a MAJOR body composition change, but doesn’t require gaining any muscle. 115lbs with 30% body fat is 34 lbs of fat.

Another easy method is to look at the MetLife charts, and pick the LARGEST number for your height. That’s the “average” weight that will have the most muscle. For example, a MetLife ideal weight for a man at 6 foot is between 160 to 196 lbs. A 160 lbs man at 6 foot won’t have a lot of muscle OR fat and one at 196 will have them in a good balance. Remember this is just an estimate taken by looking at the healthy and measurements of many people and looking at correlations. It still helps us create a better goal than “thin”.

A new goal may be, as a six foot male, instead of wanting to be thin, deciding to aim for being 196 lbs and around 20% body fat. A goal for a 5’3 woman might be, instead of trying to get back to that high school 100 lbs, trying to be around 127lbs but 30% body fat, or 135 lbs but 25% body fat. Remember, fat is bigger than muscle. Someone with 30% body fat at 127 lbs is carrying almost 5lbs more fat than someone at 135lbs and 25% body fat and it’s taking up almost 4 times the amount of space under your skin as the additional muscle the additional 8lbs of muscle the woman at 135lbs is carrying. In reality, the woman at 135/25 is carrying the same amount of fat as the woman at 115 in terms of mass, but she has 20lbs more muscle. In reality, she’s likely wearing smaller sizes in clothes than the much lighter woman.

With that in mind, determine an estimated ideal weight and body fat percentage that might be fitting for you. These are very broad goals, and might take a long time to reach. People often realize their goals aren’t as severe as they think they are, because it’s tempting to not include muscle mass as part of the goal, and pick an ideal weight that isn’t sustainable for the amount of muscle we want to have, the lifestyle we want to live. To plan a successful body composition change, it’s important to recognize what the components of the body are, and develop an achievable goal that includes building strength and retaining muscle.

In the next unit, we’ll discuss how we can use that goal body composition to shape our nutrition goals.