The term body fat percentage gets thrown around a lot, but most people don’t actually know what constitutes a healthy body fat percentage. First off, it’s self explanatory, but just in case you’re wondering, body fat percentage is the percent of body fat that is in your body. So, if you weigh 170 pounds and you have %15 body fat percentage, then you’ve got 25.5 pounds of fat. Keep in mind that fat is necessary to the body’s ability to regulate temperature, store energy, and provide your organs protection from impact. So how much is healthy? Here’s a graph that displays the different level of body fat percentage (as provided by the American Council on exercise):
Although the first section of the graph entitled “essential fat” outlines 12-15% for women and 2-5% for men, I would highly recommend that we just knock that section out of our vocabulary. Just to put it into perspective, men with a body fat percentage of 5% would be models on the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine. I will quote an excerpt from an article in the Sports Medicine section of About.com,
- “There is little evidence of any benefit when men drop under 8 percent and women drop under 14 percent body fat.”
I couldn’t agree with this more. 8% for men will get you a solid six pack with a healthy, very fit physique and the same goes for women, 14% will get you a completely flat stomach with a shapely, fit body (Note: women have more body fat than men because of the allocation in the chest and hips… it’s biology).
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So how do you measure your body fat percentage? Well, there are a few websites online that can guesstimate your body fat percentage by using the measurements of your body like your waist, hips, stomach, weight and height. I’m skeptical about this however because I’ve had my body fat percentage measured by a physical trainer using two types of measurements, neither of which exceeded 12% (this was two years ago by the way) and for some reason when I plugged it into one of those body fat percentage calculators, it said I would be around 18%.
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I would recommend to go into any national gym chain like 24 hour fitness or L.A. Fitness and they can take it for you before you even decide to join the gym. Just say that you’d like to see “where you’re at” before you decide to join, they’ll be more than happy to do so.
That being said, get your body fat measured and then make a goal for yourself!! This is really fun to do and it will give you incentive to work hard in order to reach your goal. For me, when I first started working out, I was 240 pounds at 25% body fat!!!! And if you look at the chart, that put me right at the obese category. Now I’m 188 pounds at 11% body fat, and that’s right where I want to be at this stage! My goal right now is to get to 9%, but I would never try to get any lower than that.
If you have any questions or you just want to know how I did it, let me know and I’ll talk you through it!
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Earn Your Cheat Day 