Got my Body Fat % measured - now what?

chelleymae1105

So, I got BF% measured by a trainer at my gym. She took measurements in 5 places. My BF is 28%. I was quite shocked by this, I thought it would be much higher since I'm over 200 lbs, but I do work out and have been consistently for 4-5 days a week.

A little background....I was on WW for 2 years, it worked for the first 9 months, i lost 30 lbs. But then just stopped.....I tried everything within the WW plan to make it start working again and nothing. So I founds EM2WL and it made sense that I had been eating under my BMR for so long that my metabo was damaged and i couldn't lose any more weight. I've been doing EM2WL for 3 weeks using TDEE-20%.....and this was using the most conservative TDEE calculator I found, not using BF% because I didn't have it at the time - that put my BMR at 1670, TDEE-20% at 1908 cals. I went from eating about 1400-1500 cals a day, to 1800....which is still under the TDEE-20% but I wanted to take it slow. Since starting this, I have gained 2 lbs...which I knew I had to expect. I have also added heavy lifting into my routine.

OK...so now I have my BF%, I put that in the calculator using the Katch method, and it has my BMR at 1896!!! Again, I was shocked by this. It also has be eating about 2300 cals for TDEE-20%.

This week I have upped my cals to 1900 to see what happens, cause according to the Katch calculator, at 1800 cals i'm eating under my BMR which I know isn't good.

So what should I do now? Am I going about this in the right way? Any suggestions would be really great.

Thanks!

heybales

That is the right method to use BF%, indeed.

My only question is was that a skin fold 5-site method?

I have no study formula for 5-site method, there's 3 and there's 7, normally.
http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/BodyComp.html

But it appears that may not matter, because for 85% of women, there still a chance of 4% inaccuracy with it in the study there for both those methods, so the 5-site isn't going to be any better. So as you think, perhaps realize that 4% could be higher for you.

I'd frankly mix that method in with a couple of measurement methods that can be upwards of 5% accurate. Hoping the average will be closer to the truth.

Because indeed as you found, if that is an under-reported BF%, and it would be great if it was - but basing eating on it and it really wasn't, would mean you'd have no actual deficit in place, or very minor.
Either this or the spreadsheet on my profile page.
www.gymgoal.com/dtool_fat.html