I don’t know what got into my colleague’s head today but she came back from her lunch break with a new toy – a body fat percentage calculator. At first, everyone was just snubbing the gadget – especially the women. After one tried it, though, everyone queued up to check their body fat percentage. It was quite amusing as none of us really knew what the numbers meant – so I took it upon myself to do some research and try to understand what my numbers mean.
According to Healthchecksytems:
First, your body fat percentage is simply the percentage of fat your body contains. If you are 150 pounds and 10% fat, it means that your body consists of 15 pounds fat and 135 pounds lean body mass (bone, muscle, organ tissue, blood and everything else).
Ok, so if, for example my body fat percentage is 33% (hypothetical figure, my friends. You don’t think for one moment that I would actually place my actual number here, do you? Then again, maybe I would.) Anyhow, what does this number mean? Healthchecksystems provides a chart to determine this. According to the chart, 33% would classify me as obese. So, if the figure were for real, I need to lose A LOT of weight! I like how Healthchecksystems explains how to lose weight with the body fat percentage in mind, though. You can check out the whole computation here.
Originally posted on March 19, 2008 @ 11:23 pm