Body Fat Analysis

March 23rd, 2010

Have you ever wondered just how much fat versus muscle that your body contains? Well, I have – probably a little too much. I received a very generous gift yesterday from one of my beautiful friends. (Thank you, Lisa!) It is the Omron Fat Loss Monitor.

When I woke up this morning, I did my analysis on the monitor and did not like what it said. There are two settings: Normal and Athlete. You have to do some calculations based on your activity level to figure out which setting you need to use. Well, my calculations said that I had to use the Athlete setting.

After a pit stop in the loo, I was ready to get my fat measured. It took 7 seconds and before I knew it, I was told that my BMI is high (25.5) and that I have 29.2% body fat. HUH?! Well, that’s not good! I shook the monitor to see if it would scream, “I’m wrong! I’m wrong!” It just looked back at me with the same numbers. Sigh.

Last May, I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle and sprained it and my foot really bad. Needless to say, my activity level was affected in a horrible way. After 8 weeks in a “boot,” I was allowed to do a little exercise. Do you know how much muscle loss and fat gain you can achieve in 8 short weeks? Well, I can and it ain’t pretty! I went from being in the normal BMI range to high and I don’t know how much actual fat I gained. My clothes and thighs are telling me quite a bit.

My ankle still hasn’t completely healed and it is hard for me to do aerobics to the intensity that I was doing before. I’m not using that as an excuse because my ankle didn’t force me to eat like a pig during the holiday season. I did this to myself and now I’m paying the price. I wasn’t too worried about my little fat gain because I didn’t think that I would be wearing a bikini too much this summer. Well, I was wrong! I booked a cruise last week and I will be in a bikini for 7 straight days. Oh, the horror!

What am I going to do to get bikini ready? Here’s my program:

1. Only ONE cheat meal a week. Not a cheat day, but one cheat meal – big difference!
2. Eat within my calorie range to lose 1 to 1 1/2 lbs. per week. (Find out your calorie range at www.myfitnesspal.com.)
3. Eat clean as much as I can, which is normally 90% of the time.
3. Continue to lift weights 3 days a week. I have to maintain and gain muscle to keep the furnace burning.
4. Increase my cardio from 30-45 minutes to 45-60 minutes a day. It is imperative to do lots of cardio to lose fat. Since I’m limited to what cardio I can do, I use several different methods: a) My Fitness Coach game for Wii; b) Walk Away the Pounds 4-mile Super Challenge; and c) Basic Step Aerobics while watching TV.
5. Only allow myself one piece of dark chocolate a week. Think Jell-o Pudding – Sugar Free/Fat Free Chocolate!

I’ll post my progress along the way. Hopefully, this posts will show others that sometimes we all have stumbles and struggles along the way, but we can overcome them with hard work. I’ll continue to be a work in progress.