If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The following is an excerpt of an interview I did for The Elite Body, with Rob Poulos, creator of Fat Burning Furnace.
Jim: I’m curious to hear what your answer is to this. How do you suggest that people measure their progress? What have you seen work? I know there’s weight, but what other things?
Rob: I think the number one measurement, and this is the truth, is body fat percentage — the percentage of your body that is lean and the percentage of it that is fat. Unfortunately, it’s kind of tough sometimes to get an accurate measure of that.
What’s most important is that the measuring system that you use is the same one that you use every time so the result is consistent. It might be 4% higher than your actual body fat or 4% lower, but if it’s consistent in terms in terms of always being 4% lower, which it would be if you’re using the same measuring device typically, then you’re fine. So measuring your body fat percentage is number one.
This again is something that has to be relearned because what do most people do when they get up in the morning? They go and they weigh themselves. The scale is in every single house in the planet. Which is great – body weight is part of it and seeing the scale drop is a great feeling. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I dropped 42 pounds on the scale, but I lost more fat than that because I gained muscle. A lot of time people when they use the right type of workouts where you’re adding muscle to your body they may not see the scale drop as much as they want.
We actually just did a transformation challenge for my newsletter and had a lot of great successes. We’re actually in the process of getting all the pictures on the site. People I think are really going to dig it. Some people just made amazing changes and you can see how important body fat percentage is in some of these pictures. One of the guys lost 15 pounds of fat, but he also lost 5” off his waist. Most people think, “How did you lose 5” off your waist when you only lost 15 pounds?” You’d think that probably wouldn’t be possible. The reality is that the guy built a bunch of muscle too. If you look at his picture, you can tell. He looks solid, strong and athletic and his waist looks like some other guy’s waist. The scale only showed a 15 pound loss. He lost like 9 or 10% of his body fat.
That’s where the real number is, so you have to look at body fat percentage. We actually provide a tool for anybody who signs up for our newsletter a free body fat analyzer. It just asks you for a few pieces of information like – I think the male one is different from the female one – just two or three – well I think it’s three or four measurements that you plug in and you plug in a couple of other small statistics that they’re easily attained. It will give you a rough estimate of your body fat percentage. Again, the error margin is plus or minus 3 or 4%. But if you continually use that measurement, you’ll be able to measure your loss or gain. You could actually use that.
The best way to measure your body fat is to do underwater weighing, but good luck. There are not a lot of facilities around me that do that. I don’t think anybody wants to go do that. Use the calculator that I provide. You can also get one of those bio-impedance scales. One thing I’ll warn you there is that those typically only send the signal through your lower body and it usually dies around your waist level. You really only get an accurate body fat reading of your lower body. What you want to is get hand grippers too and you could get one of those that uses the same method of measuring your body fat. That will typically only do your upper body so you can combine those two numbers, average them out and you’ll get a more realistic body fat percentage number.
That sounds like kind of a long process to go through, but I wanted to mention to people that scales do work, but they typically only measure half of your body.
Jim: Great point. They are so tied in with motivation where so many people and you see their body transforming, but because they’re building up muscle while they are burning fat, they get discouraged. What you are saying again is very important.
Rob: Jim the scale can be deceiving too because again, you go on those low carb things and you’re going to lose a bunch of water weight initially. People are like, “Wow I lost 10 pounds.” I have a buddy that loses 10 pounds once a week every three months because he goes low carb. “I lost 10 pounds again.” Then he gains 15 pounds because his body freaks out and he starts eating cake. Again, the scale is a tricky old animal. You want to watch out for the scale.
