Body composition
What is Body Composition?
Body composition is the percentage of body fat and lean mass that your body has. Lean mass is composed of muscle, bone, and water.
When women say they want to “tone up,” what they mean in technical terms is that they are looking to improve their body composition by increasing lean muscle mass and decreasing fat. Using factual terms can be really helpful in understanding the science behind how to change your body. If you want to change your body composition, we can implement protocols to help you increase muscle mass and decrease fat.
Using marketing terms like “tone up” often leave people more confused and less informed, which makes them great consumers to sell products to.
HOw is Knowing Your Body Composition Useful?
Knowing your body composition can help identify a baseline to build from and measure progress. If you are looking to change your body composition, you may want to decrease fat, increase muscle or both. Measuring or tracking your body composition can help you track any of these data points.
Body composition tracking tells us more information than tracking weight or BMI.
The limitation of weight tracking is that if you are building muscle and decreasing fat, the scale might not move, even if you are aesthetically noticing changes that you like. So if you are measuring your progress on the scale, you may become frustrated and disappointed with it and feel like you’re failing, when in reality you are progressing by changing your body composition.
BMI is an archaic measurement of health. It does not take into account lean body mass, or fat mass. It is merely your body weight in relation to your height. So you can be muscley, lean and healthy and your BMI will say you are “overweight”. BMI is is not a good predictor or indicator of health.
What is a good body composition for women?
There is no “good” or “bad” body composition. We do not assign moral value to body composition, and we believe in health at every size. Each person is entitled to their own personal goals and we are merely here to support, educate, and coach each individual to achieve their goals in a healthy and responsible way. A healthy body composition for one person may be unhealthy for another person, and vice versa.
Learn more about how to change your body composition through nutrition with our online coaching options!
How do I measure my body composition?
There are plenty of at-home scales that have the technology to tell you your body composition. Many modern scales also have apps that you can use to track progress over time. InBody and DEXA scans are both more advanced machines that you can use by going into a facility to test. (Use google to find a facility near you).
Tips
Consistency is key to using these machines.
For all machines and scales: We recommend measuring first thing in the morning before eating breakfast and after using the restroom.
If you are tracking monthly, we recommend picking a week when you are not on your period.
If you are tracking weekly, we recommend choosing the same day of the week, like a Wednesday.
If you are tracking daily using a scale, don’t stress out about small fluctuations. Similar to the stock market, we are looking for greater trends over time, not stressing about little fluctuations up or down.
