Fitness
T
his is a classic of fitness puzzles: can we lose inches and not weight? Yes, not only is the phenomenon possible but it is also common and often distressing for so called «weight-loss» program beginners. First, let us reconsider the wording. Was your initial goal to become lighter or to become thinner? Unless you are a professional jockey, aiming for the lowest category before a race, solely weighing less may not have been the point. Chances are, you aimed at fitting into a smaller size of clothes, such as a wedding dress or at getting rid of love handles before bikini
a rational, internationally understandable, and impartial measure, it remains wildly misunderstood. First, users tend to forget that the scale does not only weight tissues, but also water (on average 40 kilograms in an adult man of 70 kg), organs (the brain alone is about 1.3 kg and the skin is between 3 and 4kg), and bones (on average 17 kilograms in an adult man of 70kg). Interestingly, you may be interested in keeping those. As such, there is only a marginal part of the number you get that is reducible. For men between 20 and 40, the average body fat is between 8 and 20% of the mass. For women, in the same age range, the average body fat is between 21
on the scale, even if your body fat has remained the same. This does not mean that the procedure of weighing yourself is useless. On the contrary, weight can be an important proxy for health. Obesity is a serious medical condition, which must be addressed by professionals and in such specific cases, weight loss may become imperative, to reduce stress on joints or the cardiovascular system, for instance. You should be careful to think of your weight as a relative measure (to your age, gender and size) and not as an absolute measure. There is a difference between a 1m child weighing 50kg and a 1.70 adult weighing 50kg! To do so, a medically
Numbers Do Lie BY: NATASCIA PAOLUCCI
season. In this case, your combined diet and fitness plan becomes an “inch-loss” program, which is less catchy name, I agree. The good news is, you may not have to choose between both, as they tend to come in pairs, eventually. And the last word is essential, as it stresses the long term component of your program results. Indeed, as they fail to see the numbers drop on a scale, several people give up on their program, believing it was ineffective. And this is a mistake. Indeed, while the scale provides 68 | March 2015
and 32% of the body mass, as it has to allow child bearing. As you can now understand, the weight cannot discriminate between muscle and fat or between water and organ. It does not provide any information about your body composition. This is how, you could lose 3kg of fat and not be any lighter on the scale, if for instance, you gained 3kg of muscle. In a similar way, you could occasionally suffer from water retention (may be subject to hormonal changes) and be heavier
recognized measure, the body mass index, can help you figure in what index ranges you stand: severely underweight, underweight, healthy weight, overweight, obese of class 1 (moderate obesity), obese of class 2 (severe obesity), obese of class 3 (morbid obesity). Note that the associated indexes will vary between men and women and across the age spectrum. It is computed as a ratio: your weight divided by your squared height. Applications are abailable online.
