How often do you have your body composition tested?

PJilly

I'm curious to know how many people have their body compositions tested regularly as they lose weight to track how much of that loss is actually fat.

I'm lucky to have someone who does that for me as often as I want, so I took advantage of that and had mine tested pretty frequently (every six weeks or so) while I was working toward my goal so that I could adjust my food as necessary along the way if my lean weight was going down. Even with that diligence, I lost a little bit of lean mass, which I'm hoping to put back on.

On The Biggest Loser the other night, one of the contestants had had gastric bypass surgery when she was younger, and a doctor on the show talked about how those patients lose weight so quickly that a lot of it is muscle, but then when they gain weight back, it's mostly fat. It got me to wondering about anyone on a very low calorie diet, not just those who have had weight-loss surgery. I know the proponents of HCG say it causes the body to burn just fat, so I'm especially interested to hear from those folks about whether they've been tracking their lean mass along this weight-loss journey.

I appreciate that HCG is a sensitive subject, and I am hoping this thread doesn't invite any mean-spirited posts on either side of the debate. Fat loss vs. weight loss is extremely interesting to me, and I want to learn as much as I can about it from people's real-world experiences.

Thank you!

JustAmy

I'm very curious about this also:flowerforyou: hoping that someone with knowledge answers!

SHBoss1673

the reasoning behind his explanation on the biggest loser (for those who don't know) is more lifestyle related than actual physiology.

The reason why someone would lose muscle after GB is because their calorie limit is so low, far to low to sustain muscle mass, and therefore, while you are definitely losing fat, you're also losing muscle as the body cannot sustain the muscle mass with the allotted calories. But most probably knew that already.

The reason why you wouldn't gain muscle mass back, is because while the body will lower the metabolism quickly (relatively speaking) to stave off starvation, without specific activity required to gain new muscle mass, you won't really build much, maybe a little, but as you slowly increase your calories as your stomach expands, your body doesn't first put on muscle, it first stores extra fat because the calorie intake is so low the body is in "conservation" mode.

You WILL eventually gain some muscle mass back, as the body find's it new equallibrium and can devote resources to building NEEDED muscle, but only needed muscle. And since most obese people (NOTE that I said most, not all) exercise little, there's really not a lot of need for new muscle mass.

The obvious combat for this situation is to begin regular and quite vigorous exercise as soon as you are cleared by the doctor to do so. That's the only way to combat muscle loss. Unfortunately, that's generally not emphasized by most GB doctors (or at least not strenuously emphasized) and what good intentions people start out with, fall by the wayside in the course of normal life (because there is no lifestyle change with a GB surgery, you alleviated the symptom, not the problem). This is my biggest problem with GB, not that it can't or doesn't work, not even the safety issue (though that's a concern), It's the fact that this surgery doesn't alter the lifestyle that made you obese in the first place. And if you DO change after, great, but it proves the point that it could have been done alone without surgery.

rose1617

it proves the point that it could have been done alone without surgery.

I have a friend who had part of her stomach removed. She's lost almost 200 lbs. in a year, but can only eat about 700 calories per day. She's slowly been able to add things to her calorie intake, but not much.
Anyway, I digress. In order to have the surgery, she had to lose X amount of pounds (don't remember the exact number, think it was something like 50?). Well, if she lost those pounds easily enouh, then why did she need the surgery?! She should have just kept going on that regimen and lost the rest of it naturally.
Now she can't eat out with us at a restaurant because she never knows how her stomach is going to react to the food, so she boxes it up to go and eats at home. She only eats 2 meals a day because of the calorie deficit, so oftentimes she forgets that other people need three meals/day at least to stay full :P
I just don't get it.

Douniap

I'm curious to know how many people have their body compositions tested regularly as they lose weight to track how much of that loss is actually fat.

I'm lucky to have someone who does that for me as often as I want, so I took advantage of that and had mine tested pretty frequently (every six weeks or so) while I was working toward my goal so that I could adjust my food as necessary along the way if my lean weight was going down. Even with that diligence, I lost a little bit of lean mass, which I'm hoping to put back on.

I get mine tested every 4 to 5 months and I get my VO2 & LT tested every year :bigsmile:
Cheers
Dounia

Azdak

You have to be careful about testing too quickly, since there is a standard of error in the most common techniques that is at least 2%-5% under the best of conditions and accuracy. Testing too soon means that enough change may not have occurred to get readings that are outside of the error factor. Meaning that one reading could have "underestimated" body fat % by say 2% and the next one "overestimate" by 2% showing little or no change, even though change might actually be occurring. We do not retest any sooner than 3 months and even then there is more variability than I would like (measurements can have a significant positive or negative effect on motivation).

I still think that one of the most sensitive ways to track fat loss is to measure circumferences at various anatomical sites. It's not an accurate way to measure body fat %, but the changes usually reflect real changes. Just make sure you have someone else do the measurements and they do them in the same location the same way.

PJilly

Bumping in hopes of getting more answers to my question, which was probably poorly worded. What I'm interested in is finding out if any people on very low-calorie diets are tracking their body compositions and, if so, what percentage of their weight loss is fat. Further, I'm interested to find out if that percentage differs between people taking HCG and people not taking it. Thanks!

Azdak

Bumping in hopes of getting more answers to my question, which was probably poorly worded. What I'm interested in is finding out if any people on very low-calorie diets are tracking their body compositions and, if so, what percentage of their weight loss is fat. Further, I'm interested to find out if that percentage differs between people taking HCG and people not taking it. Thanks!

You are not going to get much in the way of worthwhile data. Individual anecdotal evidence does not mean very much on this question. There are too many variables--little if anything from someone else's experience will be relevant to you. Even the research is unclear on this subject.