Health & Fitness with Ricky Parcell
To use weigh-ins and body fat tests without the process turning into an emotional roller coaster, you need to understand that strange numbers or results are bound to show up from time to time due to natural body-weight fluctuations.
There will also be good weeks and bad weeks based on your compliance rate and life circumstances or passing events!
A simple re-frame in your mind helps you handle the ups, the downs and the uncertainties:
If you had a result you didn’t want one week, you look at it as feedback, not failure.
Think of your numbers as a navigation system, like one you’d find in an airplane or rocket. When your progress feedback shows that you’re not heading in the right direction, that’s not a failure, that’s simply a signal to make a course correction. If a pilot quit every time a plane was slightly off course, no one would ever get anywhere, so don’t get frustrated and angry, just change course.
Successful people don’t even worry about one week off course. They simply change their approach, increase their compliance and get back to work. They don’t worry about an odd one-week fluctuation in weight or body fat. They focus on their long-term goal and their progress trend over time without obsessing over it!
There are 4 main ways to measure yourself –
- Underwater weighing – Submerging the body in a tank for a few seconds underwater in a special tank.
- Bio impedence – A harmless electric pulse sent around the body to record body fat.
- Calipers – Pinching specific areas of the body to measure fat with a special instrument.
- Tape measure – Using a tape to measure the body at the hips and waist…
At www.thebodycamp.com in ibiza, we use a very accurate and expensive system and scales linked to a laptop for our guests. This then prints off vast amounts of information on fat mass, fat free mass, BMI and bone density etc. This system uses bio-impedence. But we also like using the tape measure too!
After attending our retreat, we recommend guests consider weighing themselves once a week for an “official” progress report. Monday is a good day because it helps keep a lot of people in check over the weekend!
In addition, why not get a measuring tape and measure your waist size (women may also want to measure hips too).
What’s more, waist measurement is a scientifically-proven benchmark for metabolic and cardiovascular health risks.
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that are linked to risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. One of the risk factors is abdominal circumference of 35 inches or more for women or 40 inches or more for men. That makes the waist size / abdominal circumference measurement a good one to monitor for both health and body fat tracking reasons.
Track these numbers, and combine that feedback with an assessment of how you look in the mirror every week, and you should have no difficulty navigating your way to your goal without a body fat test.
Don’t become obsessed with pursuing any specific body fat number, thinking that it’s some kind of “holy grail” achievement.
It’s true: The body fat percentage number really doesn’t matter if you are happy with the way you look. Also keep in mind that two people can look completely different at the same body fat percentage – one visibly much leaner than the other. That is to say, “people wear their body fat differently.”
But measuring the change in the numbers and seeing your progress move in the right direction does matter. Use your body fat test results as an educational tool to understand body composition and also as a tracking tool to monitor your personal progress over time and you can’t go wrong.
Rick Parcell
Partner and Mind/Body program creator www.thebodycamp.com
