To understand body weight we need to first understand body composition. How human body is built and what are the main components of the human body.
Human body can be broadly classified in to the following components
· Bones
· Skeletal muscle & Connective tissues
· Organs & Body Fluids – blood, hormones, enzymes, etc.
· Essential fat – Brain tissue, cell membranes, soft tissue organs
· Adipose tissue – body fat
Every time you check weight on the weighing scale you are measuring the combined weight of all the components of the human body.
Let’s have a look at what the ideal body composition should look like.
These are approximations and can vary for exceptional individuals.
So every time a person drops their body weight or gains body weight, does not mean that he/she has only lost body fat or only gained body fat.
It is always a combination of all 5 components with which body is built. If the goal is to track only adipose tissue (nonessential - body fat) then weighing scale is the most inefficient tool for this measure (unfortunately the most popular).
So every time you see drop in weight instead of thinking that you have improved your health you should become alert and make sure that all the other essential components of your body are preserved and mostly you have lost non essential body fat. Weight loss that you see should never be loss of your health. Unfortunately most of the time weight loss achieved with poor nutrition is actually, loss of important and essential body components, this accelerates aging process, exact opposite of what a person wants to achieve through weight loss program.
Generally weight loss is misunderstood as fat loss; it is like equating 1kg of gold to 1kg of sand and it is OK to lose half kg of sand along with half kg of gold. One should never aim for weight loss we should always protect and preserve vital components of human body and if possible do everything in our capacity to add more weight to our essential tissue mass which will in return gives us better health and improved quality of life.
Adipose tissue – excess body fat which is a non-essential component of human body, visceral body fat (unwanted fat stored around the internal organs), for all of us to be healthy
We should reduce both adipose tissue and visceral fat as low as possible. All the efforts to improve the body composition should not be focused just on keeping unwanted body fat low but at the same time build and preserve all the other vital components of body and aspire to perform at the peak of our natural physical & mental capacity.
How to measure body fat
Best way to measure body fat is individual performance – I know you have never heard this before but let me explain.
Person with ideal/low body fat will always display a good physical performance, even when they don’t fit in to the socially acceptable body weight range. For understanding this concept have a look at different athletes all around the world with variety of body composition and corresponding body weight.
Body weight of some of the top performing male athlete’s
1.Usain Bolt – 94kg (fastest man on the earth – sprinter )
2.Michale Phelps – 90kg (13 Olympic gold medals - swimming )
3.Cristiano Ronaldo - 83kg (One of the best football player alive)
4.Arnold Schwarzenegger -107kg ( 7 Times - Mr.Olympia)
5.Virat Kohli – 70kg (ICC male cricketer of the decade )
6.Mahendra Singh Dhoni – 70kg (ICC ODI plyer of the year 2009)
Body weight of some of the top performing female athlete’s
1.Karnam malleswari – 69kg (Bronze in weight lifting Olympics 2000)
2.Geeta Phogat – 55kg (Gold in wrestling commonwealth games 2010)
3.Saina Nehwal – 60kg (2 golds in commonwealth games 2010/2018)
4.Tia Toomey – 58kg (4 times winner fittest women alive Rebook CrossFit games 2017,2018,2019,2020)
5.Katrin Deviosdottir ( 2 times winner fittest women alive CrossFit games 2015,2016 )
6.Bakhar Nabieva – 56kg ( fitness model )
Now when you look at these athletes perform on the field in their respective sport you will be amazed to see their physical and mental capabilities. Everyone is different in size, shape, height and weight but all of them have one common factor and that is low body fat percentage. Human body’s shape, density of bone, density of muscle, size of muscle belly, muscle insertions and origins depend on genetic code. If we compare all the male athlete’s body weight with a common man’s body weight none of them would fit into the Body Mass Index of healthy person, we can even call them obese if we just look at their body weight without knowing their real body composition.
Same goes for female athletes as well if you see more body weight does not mean more adipose tissue (body fat), and less body weight does not mean thin and weak. Just by looking at female athletes body weight we will neither term them underweight nor over weight.
Such a poor and illogical marker to check individual health needs to change, and we all should focus more on how efficiently we are performing our daily tasks and try to improve overall physical performance which will improve quality of our life.
Correct nutrition coupled with correct training program will help everyone to improve health and task specific fitness along with improved body composition. Fat loss will be a byproduct of the healthy lifestyle and consistent execution of progressive over load + right nutrition + adequate rest and recovery.
Next time if you want to track your progress see how you are performing physically and mentally. If your performance is not going up then weight loss you see on the scale is actually health lost. And if your performance is going up then weight gained on the scale is health gained.
So does that mean one should aspire for weight gain – NO!
You should not measure the overall weight it is useless marker, it can give illusion to a thin person who weighs less that he/she is fine even when they are actually becoming skinny fat and losing vital components of body composition.
Also more weight on the scale and unrealistic society standards can make a healthy person rethink about his/her condition and many time pushes them to take extreme steps to bring their weight on the scale down at the cost of losing vital components of body composition such as muscle, bone density, etc.
For those who are really interested in finding out there body composition transformation and keep a close check on changes in body composition – the best method available is Duel energy X-ray absorptiometry popularly known as DEXA scan will give you accurate readings of all vital body components along with adipose tissue (unwanted body fat%).
If you are really interested in improving health and fitness hope you will throw the useless health tracker “Weighing Scale” as soon as you finish reading this post.
Wishing you a true well-being.
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