Yeah....I wanna throw-in my 2-cents on this one for sure.
I'm a numbers guy....my bike riding involves miles, elevation & lots of data. I wear an HR-monitor and love the calorie-counter. So it should come as no surprise that I need some guage as a means to monitor & evaluate my weight-loss results.
My problem is that I hop on the scale and find no weight-loss...despite looking leaner. The answer was found when using the bodyfat calipers: I'd consistently lose bodyfat% but not always weight. Needless to say, we adopted the BF% as my means of judgement & evaluation.
Now, my nutritionist writes for Men's Health and he's all into everything fitness related. I can't recall his numbers, but there was a VAST difference bertween his own measured bodyfat% based on the water-tank, the fat calipers and even DEXA (Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry) and even the units you hold in your hands or scales you step on. Results varied from 14.3% to 26.7% (or something like that). And the water-tank & DEXA, two of the most highly regarded methods, were vastly different in numbers, but as much as 6.5%
The water-tank can't take into consideration your hydration level, bone-density and a few other factors. The body-fat calipers only measure the subcutaneous fat under the skin and only at those exact locations being pinched (granted they have about 3-5 set locations that are supposed to give you an overall idea), the devices you hold only pass electricity through those parts of your body between the two points of contact and even DEXA was disappointing but perhaps the most accurate.
So while I turn to these numbers & measures for my precious data....they're all too often unreliable and frustrating. About the only thing I can take from the BF% calipers is that if the results show dropping numbers, I'm losing fat....at least on a subcutaneous level, as for the more important and health-related visceral fat...who knows.
It's all so frustrating, but in the end it still comes down to how you look & feel and more often then not we don't allow ourselves to be as happy as we should be with our bodies. Is it not our strongest ability to focus on what remains to be lost or what flaw we find then to celebrate our strengths? I'm absolutely at odds with this stubborn kidney flab coming around the back of my waist...and yet I see models in magazines and EVERY MMA wrestler with their back muffin going on. That's why I HATE cycling shorts or jammers; they cut into your skin because they're tight and I just can't stand having that skin bulging just above the fabric. And ya know what....I just won't ever have that rock-perfect body unless I eat about 800 calories per day, endure endless hunger....I just don't think the human body, or perhaps my body, is comfortable at that level of intense deprivation...so it is what it is. :eating:
