Visceral fat matters!

While I was doing strong lifts, I ate a lot of food. I basically stuffed myself every 3 hours. And I think that was a bad thing. I think the body cannot take a sudden huge inflow of calories. And it has a nice way of showing that I am eating over the limit. If you look at my photo right after the strong lifts season you will notice the effect of over eating. Here it is again

I have a belly now. And it is not the soft flabby fat at the lower part of the midsection. Before I explain I should first start with the types of body fat that effect the midsection. So there are 2 types of fat – subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat that settles at the lower part of midsection. This is soft and you can measure the fat by pinching your skin and measuring the thickness. Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds the internal organs. This is hard and settles in the upper part of midsection. You cannot pinch it. Although I had some flab I noticed that the upper portion was protruding more. And why wouldn’t it? I am putting on a lot of visceral fat.

Thanks to my omoron body fat measuring scale I was able to track my visceral fat along with subcutaneous fat. I started with visceral fat of 3 and at the end of my overeating days it was showing 4. Not a lot of difference on the scale but I noticed it a lot on my body. With my tiny frame any little increase in visceral fat will immediately show on me. My next objective is to reduce the fat and especially visceral fat because it is also the cause of many diseases.

Filed under: Uncategorized, body fat, subcutaneous fat, visceral fat

Body Weight and Body Fat stats from Jan 2009

It was sometime in early January of 2009. It suddenly hit me. While I was getting stronger doing P90X, I was also feeling that I was gaining weight. All the exercises are making me more hungry and since I was still eating junk, I basically ate more junk. I could see my gut project out ever so slightly for the first time. I did not like what I saw. That is when I decided to invest in some body fat measuring device. After a thorough search on the internet and reading about pros and cons of various devices I decided to buy 2 of them.

I initially bought a body fat calipers that was recommended by many experts from body building forums. It was easy to use, but I am not sure if I am taking the readings properly or not but when I measured at the location mentioned in the booklet I always got less body fat. Something like 12%. I was sure I was not at that body fat percentage.

So I went ahead and brought myself a body weight and body fat measuring scale. This was very easy to use. In addition to displaying body weight and body fat percent measurements, it also displays muscle percentage, visceral fat, BMI and resting calories. I don’t really care about BMI because it is a number that does not make any sense and is not related to good health or strength. I used the resting calories as my base for how much I can consume per day. I don’t routinely look at that measurement. Just once in a month or two. Muscle percentage is also something I rarely look at. I don’t see it increasing by much anyway. Finally the measurement I am most interested (after body fat percent) is visceral fat. I could clearly relate to it and how I look in the mirror. More about it in some other blog post.

Anyway all the details aside the important thing is, it is very easy to use. However it was not consistent across days and not even across various times of a day. I don’t mean it is throwing random numbers. If you take 10 reading consecutively you will see consistent results. But if you take 10 reading evenly spread out throughout the day then there will be a lot of variance. As much as 4% difference between the min and max. The measurement depends on the state of you body at the time of measurements. Basically the device sends electric signals from the base and reads the signal strength from the hand held. Basing on the fact that water conducts more electricity and because muscle stores more water than fat, the device uses some algorithm to calculate body fat percent. So depending on whether you have more or less water or more or less food the reading will be different. Not only that. The reading is effected by what you eat too. I found that if I have a pizza for dinner the previous day then the fat percentage on the following morning is usually low! Not sure how or why that is the case.

Be what the readings may be I decided to take my measurements every saturday morning right after I woke up. This is what I got on January 24, 2009

Body weight: 122.0
Body fat percentage: 14.0%
Visceral fat: 3
Muscle percentage: 43.5%
Resting calories: 1423 calories
  

Filed under: Uncategorized, body fat, muscle, visceral fat, weight