Obesity is linked to diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. However, if you are only weighing yourself or calculating your BMI to find out if you are obese, you are missing vital information for your health. Your BMI does not tell you how much of your weight is made up of fat. Yet research shows that the fat, not your weight per se, is the health risk.
Considerations
Neither the scale nor your BMI can differentiate between lean muscle mass and fat. When managing your weight, monitor percent body fat too. Excessive fat, and not excessive weight, has negative health implications. Even if you have a normal BMI, you can still have an above-average amount of body fat that can cause health concerns. Your percentage body fat can also affect athletic performance. As body fat increases, your speed and agility are compromised, and your potential for injury rises as well. Keeping track of percent body fat as well as pounds is important because it is a more accurate indicator of your health and fitness level.
Types
The American Council of Exercise makes recommendations for percent body fat that depend on both gender and fitness level. For athletes, males are given a range of 14 percent to 20 percent and females a range of 6 percent to 13 percent. For fit individuals, percent body fat ranges from 14 percent to 17 percent for males and 21 percent to 24 percent for females. Acceptable body fat levels for maintaining health range from 18 percent to 25 percent for men and 25 percent to 31 percent for women. Anything above these levels fall into the obese range and is considered a health risk.
Misconceptions
Having too little body fat is not healthy either. Knowing your percent body fat is important because it tells you if your weight loss goals are safe and realistic. The body needs a certain amount of fat to carry out daily functions such as vitamin absorption, temperature control and protection of internal organs. A minimum of 10 percent to 12 percent body fat is recommended for women, and 2 percent to 4 percent for men.
Identification
Health clubs realize the benefit of tracking percent body fat and often offer customers a way to measure it. Your gym may offer the skin-fold method, which uses calipers to measure pinches of skin in precise locations of your body that are then used to determine percent body fat. If you'd prefer convenience, invest in a body fat analyzer for use at home. These send an electrical signal through your body. The resistance between the conductors yields an estimated percentage of body fat.
Expert Insight
More than half of American adults with a BMI in the normal range have percent body fat levels in the obese range, as well as heart and metabolic complications, according to a 2008 study by cardiologist Francisco Lopez-Jimenez and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic. This demonstrates the potential hazard of having above recommended levels of body fat even if you are considered to be at a normal weight.
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