I Use a Body Fat Scale Every Day but What the Heck Do All the Different Numbers Mean?

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Body fat scale every day, but what the heck do all the different numbers mean? Do I need to care about all of them? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Tiffany from Facebook asks, I use a body fat scale every day, but what the heck do all those different numbers mean and what are considered good numbers? BMI Body Fat percentage, Fat Free Body weight, Subcutaneous Fat percentage, Visceral fat, Body Water, Skeletal Muscle percentage, Muscle mass, Bone mass, Protein percentage, BMR and metabolic age are the numbers that generate on my app each time I step on the scale. What are they? Do I need to care about all of them? Phew. Thankfully, no. I'm going to give you kind of a deconstruction of what this all really means and what you should be looking for and what the ideals are when we come back. Stay with me.

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All right. I love body fat scales. In fact, fun fact, years ago, when I was on the Dr. Phil weight loss challenges, I brought the Tanita body fat scale to the masses because they were just doing weight and it's not what your weight is made up of. You've got to look at what's fat and what's fat free mass. Just like what I say is if you're losing weight and not losing your waist, you're making self worse, not better. Same here. If you're losing weight but you're not losing fat, you're just losing muscle, we've got a problem. Or if your toe feet thin, outside fat inside, that means that you're maintaining your weight through diet alone and not exercise. And you're actually a skinny fat. So this is a super important thing to look at and I applaud you for having a body composition scale. So these body fat scales are based on water. And that's a really important fact to understand because that means that if you are retaining water, you're actually gonna look like you've got less body fat and more muscle. And if you're dehydrated, you'll look like you have more body fat and less muscle. So if you do something like take a bunch of diuretics, step on the scale the next day, and it looks like you've lost weight. Well, you might have lost weight, but you also probably are gonna go down in your muscle mass. And then the converse is true too. So I like to use a scale every single day and I tell people to get the emotion out of it. This is not like a mean friend. This is information. Just like a continuous glucose monitor would be, just like an oura ring or an apple watch. It's giving you information and it's really important because if you see your fluid fluctuating, you know, one of the things we know in the virgin diet, that if you eat a lot of high five foods, high food and tolerance foods, you can create more inflammation and hold onto fluid. So you really do want to be looking at this and what you're looking at the key numbers you want to look at are you want to look at your total body water. This should after when you initially go on a program like let's say you go on the virgin diet, you may see your total body water dip down initially if you start to lower some carbs and get out some of that inflammation. That's not the type of fluid you want in your body. You know you want more, more water. Stored water is stored with glycogen in your muscles. So that's one of the things that's going to help raise your total body water muscle more water. You don't want to have fluid from inflammation around. So you'll see it normalize after a couple of days and then start to track your total body water. And you want to see that gradually increasing. What you're going to get from your total body water is the machine is going to give you two things and these are the two things that are really important to look at. Lean body mass or fat free mass and then fat mass. Basically your body's made up two things, right? Fat mass and that's everything for fat masses is just the fat and then everything else is fat free mass. What we're really looking for, of course in fat free mass is skeletal muscle. But ideally, if you see your fat free mass going up, you know it's not your bone density doing it, it's your muscle going up. So what we really want to look at is number one, your fat mass. And if they can tell you your visceral fat, that's the fat around your waist, that's a really important metric to monitor because you want to make sure as you're losing weight that you're losing fat and you're especially losing belly fat. That is why we want to make sure that you're both weighing in every day. Looking at your body fat, your body composition as a trend, you might see one weird day up or down. Again, that could be just because maybe you're retaining water or maybe you had something that was more diuretic. You're looking for the trends there over time for a couple days, not overnight. And then once a week doing your waist and hip measurements because you want to make sure that as you lose weight, you lose waste, right? So next thing here is you asked what is your bmi? So body fat percentages, let me give you that first. Here's the weird thing. When I was in graduate school a load of years ago, they well actually this was in doctoral school, we were testing all these different types of ways to test your body fat. Everything from underwater weighing to skinfold calibers to this type of a scale. And what I discovered, actually we didn't even have this type of scale yet. We had dexa, which is really the gold standard. We had underwater weighing and then we had calipers. One of the things that I discovered over time is that calipers are a great way to really tell if you're metabolically unhealthy. Because if you do skinfold calipers, which check the amount of fat subcutaneous, and then extrapolate a body composition number, and if you find that you're lean in your skin, fold calipers. But when you do either total, you do total body water through a scale, or you do underwater weighing or you do a dexa and you're much higher in body fat, that means you're more metabolically unhealthy, you've got more visceral fat. So something to think about here. But back when I was doing that and looking at all of this stuff, that's one of the things I realized is that calipers, as you become more metabolically unhealthy, really don't do well. The other thing that's not great is your body mass index. This is the BMI is a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters, which means we're still looking at your height and your weight to get your body mass index. And honestly, you've got to look at what your weight is made up of. That is why it's so important. So back when I was in doctoral school at SC, we were told that healthy women were 18 to 22% body fat. You know, they could still be healthy up to 25% body fat. Once they hit about 30% body fat, they started to become more insulin resistant. 32% men and an athletic woman would be somewhere in the 15 to 20% range. And women had 10 to 12% essential fats, fat they need to have on their body to survive. Men, 3 to 5% essential fat. An athletic male would be somewhere in the 5 to 12% range. A healthy male would be somewhere in the 8 to 15% range. And when men got to be about 18 to 20%, they started to be metabolically unhealthy. Now we've kind of started to shift this thinking, which I disagree with. And this is why I think we really gotta look beyond weight to see what that weight is made up of, and then look at how to get you to the ideal body composition for you because remember, fat's not just something that sits around and does nothing. Fat has these inflammatory cytokines and it also can store toxins. So it's not just this benign thing. It's actually very problematic. And this is why it's so important to understand what you're looking for and to look at the trends. And so remember I had this client back when I owned a gym and she came in and she was her ideal bmi, right? She was the right height for her weight, but she didn't like the way her body looked and she was just kind of fluffy, right? And what was interesting is her weight didn't change at all when we worked together, but her body fat dropped, I think like 5%. She went down two clothing sizes. And this is why we've got to get off of the scale for scale's sake. We've got to look at body fat percentage and we've got to start to trend. Are you holding onto or building lean mass as you're losing fat? Are you losing fat? Are you losing fat in your visceral area, in your tummy, belly fat? Or is it just subcutaneous? All this stuff is so important. And remember what you measure and monitor, you can improve. All right? So if you've got questions, I got answers. All you need to do is jump onto Instagram. JJ Virgin, Leave me a question there and we will be answering it in one of my upcoming episodes. Thanks for tuning in. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com. Foreign.

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