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Fat Loss vs Weight Loss

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In fact, you may lose the muscle first when dieting without exercise. Since muscle has a higher metabolic cost to maintain, your body will usually sacrifice it first. You body fat percentage may actually increase during your diet, since your body may think you are heading into lean or famine times, thereby conserving your fat and reducing your metabolic rate to burn fewer calories. This makes you tired, grouchy and hungry. Worse, it makes you flabbier!

But how to reduce body fat and keep your muscle mass? It’s no secret, that’s for sure – regular exercise and careful selection of the foods you eat.

How can you tell if it’s working? Start by looking in the mirror. You can see the results of working out in just a month or two – even if you don’t kill yourself in the process.

Work on keeping or increasing your muscle mass and lowering your body fat percentage – you can do both - despite popular wisdom.

Need to know your rough body fat percentage? Download this cool Excel chart here: Body Fat Excel File (362Kb)

How much body fat do you need to lose? Well, consider this chart:

If your body fat percentage is:	You are considered to be:
2-3%	Near death – this is too low. You look like a concentration camp victim.
4-7%	Super ripped – you should be able to see every muscle and vein clearly – this is borderline unhealthy.
8-9%	Ripped – very little body fat – almost unnoticeable – body builders and athletes reach these levels.
10-11%	Thin and in great shape. You should have noticeable muscle definition.
12-13%	You should look to be in good shape and slim – no belly.
14-16%	Normal body fat percentage for a healthy person. You might have a small bit of fat around the mid section, but not look overweight.
17-19%	You still look good, but not slim or showing any muscle definition.
20-21%	Borderline overweight.
22-29%	You need to lower you body fat percentage and you look fat. You are officially overweight at 25%.
30% and above	You are obese and need a serious fat loss program along with medical advice today. You are at higher risk for all kinds of diseases including diabetes and heart attacks.

Men and women are not the same – and neither is everyone’s definition of being fat. See chart below:

Body Fat Guidelines from American Council on Exercise Classification

	Women (% Fat)	Men (% Fat)
Essential Fat	10-12 percent	2-4 percent
Athletes	14-20 percent	6-13 percent
Fitness	21-24 percent	14-17 percent
Acceptable	25-31 percent	18-25 percent

Note that women can have a considerably higher body fat percentage than men and still not be considered overweight. Much of this fat is stored in the thighs, buttocks and breasts so some women actually look better with a higher percentage of body fat.

Getting below 10% is a real challenge that few who are not genetically endowed to be skinny achieve. Your body naturally likes a certain body fat percentage and will strongly resist going below that level. You can do it, but it will require months, if not years of hard work to lower this number.

You’ll also need more effective fat measuring tools – these can be a bit tricky to use, but they give fairly accurate results.

Using unnatural means to do this – diet pills and the like – can cause serious health problems including death, so think twice about this route. Plastic surgery is another dangerous method – look at what happened to Donda West, mother of famous rapper, Kanye West. She died of complications after getting liposuction.

Worse, these methods usually don’t last. 90% of those who use these methods jump back to their old body fat percentage within 6 months - those that don’t change to a healthy regime including a proper diet and frequent exercise.

So you’ll never hear us using the words “weight loss”. We always talk about fat burning, not weight loss. Focus on that and being healthier. Leave the weight loss to the rest of the ill-informed masses.

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