Losing weight, but body fat increasing

sijomial wrote: »

How are you measuring body fat?

This. Most simple "body fat" measuring tools are wildly inaccurate.

BBC1986 wrote: »

I have a scale that does it

No, it doesn't. Seriously - those things literally don't work.

You were either lied to, or the person telling you that didn't know what (s)he was talking about.

Here - try this, to convince yourself. Weigh yourself and take note of the body fat. Drink a glass of water. Reweigh yourself. Your BF% will probably change. Granted, this doesn't work every single time, so you may need to try it a few times.

singingflutelady wrote: »

Yup according to mine I am 30% bf too. I'm not ripped or anything but I am definitely not 30%

31.5% here, according to the scale. I'm tempted to switch it to "athlete" mode to see what it gives me.

Most of those scales are using a pre-determined formula, not actually doing anything to measure your body fat.

@bbc1986 OMG- I looked at your diary- YOU ARE STARVING YOURSELF! THIS IS NOT HEALTHY. Of course you are losing muscle and gaining % body fat. Your poor body is CANIBALIZING its own lean muscle tissue in an effort to keep you alive!

FROM YOUR DIARY: Tuesday: 640 calories, Wednesday- 1040 calories, Thursday 835 calories, Friday 775 calories, Saturday **374** calories?????? And 3 of those days you also EXERCISED???? You are going to make yourself SERIOUSLY ILL or even KILL YOURSELF. "Losing weight" is not everything. If you don't care about your health, I'm sure that you want to LOOK GOOD??? If you keep this up, you are going to look AWFUL. Skeletons who can barely walk are NOT attractive.

They're basically BMI calculators. They try to sell you on bio-impedance, which actually CAN be accurate - if you go to a facility with multi-point sensors. Anything that claims to tell you your BF from standing on it or just holding little handles is a joke.

Here's a good (albeit long) article on it.

BIA can be problematic because it's a prediction based off of a prediction, so the error gets compounded. When you look at group averages for BIA measurements, there tends to be bias, with BIA often underpredicting how much fat you have. As with other techniques, the individual error rates can get high, with some research showing error rates of around 8-9%. In fact, BIA doesn't do much better than BMI at predicting body fat in some cases. When it comes to measuring change over time, BIA can often underpredict the amount of fat loss, and the estimated change can be off by up to 8%.

For all of these reasons, I am not a fan of BIA for measuring body composition in individuals. If you are going to use BIA for tracking body composition over time, I recommend very long time intervals between measurements (at least 3 months, but 6 months is probably better), as the error rate for BIA can be larger than the changes in body fat in you see. Whatever numbers you do get using BIA, always remember they are very rough predictions....and I emphasize very rough.


There are 3 good ways to measure body fat, depending on how far you're willing to go.

1. High price, highest accuracy: If you want to know for certain what your BF really is, and you're willing to seriously shell out (tests can be anywhere from $75-$200, but some people will get them once or twice a year), do a search for hydrostatic body fat testing in your area. A good place to look is any colleges in the area. If they have a high profile sport program, they'll often do hydrostatic testing for the public as a source of extra funding. They submerge you in water and determine based on water displacement and body mass. This is considered "the gold standard" and is far and away more accurate than anything else.

2. Moderate cost, high accuracy: Air Displacement Plethysmography technology (ADP). Search for "Bod Pod." This is based on a very similar process as hydrostatic, but uses air instead of water, and is much cheaper, often around $50.

3. As accurate as you're going to get without paying a per-measurement fee: The US Navy created a way of determining it based on measurements. While closer to BMI than the above tests, I've found it to be a lot more accurate than BMI or bio-impedance (or at least home bio-impedance). Particularly because unlike BMI or BIOI which goes on this ridiculously generic concept of "the average body," it takes into account actual body measurements, so if you're ripped but really muscular, it's not going to tell you you're morbidly obese.

I'm using the Navy calculator for my daily measurements until I get closer to my former training size of 8% BF, at which point I'll be doing Bod Pod every 4-6 months.