BMI / Body fat - confusion

Do you feel in decent shape yourself? That's all that matters.

BMI and weight are not good measures of health so for a start, I'd stop worrying about either.

Lowering body fat percentage to a healthy range is a good thing (regardless of how fit you are according to recent research) so you can keep aiming to do that but, as alluded to by theoretica, the only reliable way to get a reading is with skin fold calipers. For all our technology body fat reading is not something we've cracked.

That said I personally think a mirror comes a close second for measuring (subcutaneous) body fat and is quicker than skin fold calipers.

As to how you achieve your goals, you crucially omit to mention anything about diet. A clean diet will make a big difference in both body shape and how you feel. If you think there's some improvements to be made there (I recommend natural, whole foods over reduced fat or 'diet' products) then give that a try and see if it makes a difference.

You've clearly made some good progress on your strength and aerobic fitness. If you think that's reached a plateau then look to increase the intensity of some of it. Increase the weight of your lifts, replace some walking with running. I think you've reached a stage where step counts will be fairly meaningless. They're a good measure when walking is all a trainee can manage but once you've reached a basic level of fitness increasing step count will have a fairly minimal impact.

Bottom line is you're doing great and now you just need to kick a few things up a notch and you'll see even more progress!

sickasachip13 wrote: »

Hi there, I'm new to this area of the forum and I'm hoping someone will take pity on me and help me get my head round something! I've lost approx 14kgs over the past 18 months - it's been slow and steady and I've now held this weight for the past 6 months or so. I've reached (just) a normal BMI but have what is described as an obese level of body fat - but low visceral fat (thankfully).

Female
age 46
Height 5' 4'
Size 12 bottm, 14 top
Weight 66kgs
BMI 24.6
Visceral fat 6
Body fat 38.4%
(I have checked my body fat on two different machines and they came out within 1% of each other, so I do think it's accurate)

I'm really quite strong and have good cardio. I exercise in the gym 2 / 3 times per week. Do yoga. I walk 11k steps at least five days per week, and include on average 30-40 flights of stairs. I can walk 15-20 miles, up and down hills without difficulty and without many aches the next day.

What's going on? I would like to lose a bit more weight but these fat results have really got me down tbh.

If I got my fat down to a normal range, what would the weight loss be? Or is it about converting more fat to muscle. Any thoughts/info/advice gratefully received.

Cheers!

It would be helpful if you explained which methods you used to measure body fat. If it was two models of the same machine, it's not surprising you got the same result (reliable, but not necessarily valid). If they were different methods (e.g., BA and skinfolds), I would trust the validity of the average of the two a little more.

Also, how do you know you have low visceral fat? You'd only know this if you had some sort of scan (DXA or MRI).

BMI is a seriously over-used method for indicating body fatness. It is relatively accurate for prepubescent children and some women, but not for men.It really should be used very cautiously at the individual level.

It may simply be that the machines are inaccurate. Or you may be one of the "skinny fat" members of the population. Or you may not be genetically programmed to respond to exercise (a low-responder). Also, if you don't mind disclosing, what race are you? Typically, BMI overestimates fatness in people of Afro-Caribbean origin, but underestimates people of Asian origin (as they racially tend to be more "skinny-fat")