Measure Your Progress

An extremely important part of your fitness program is being able to measure your progress.

Body fat testing is not painful, nor is it expensive. You can get it done at most any gym or fitness center. Simply ask if they have an expert who can measure body composition.

It's also a good idea to take before and after photos' and post them somewhere you'll see them every day.
But most importantly, measure 5 - 10 different aspects of your progress.

My most successful clients measure everything in their life that's affected by their weight loss, normally on a simple scale from 1 - 10, such as:

* their daily energy level
* their attitude
* the way they feel when they look in the mirror
* the way they fit into their clothes
* the compliments they get from people
* their level of mental focus
* their waist, hips, and thigh measurements
* their body weight
* their body-fat level
* their endurance in their workouts
* etc, etc, etc...

Make a long list of ways you can measure your progress - but be sure to include things that are truly important to YOU.

If having loads of energy is important to you, then you should be measuring your energy level every day to see if your diet and/or workout routine are doing their job.

On the other hand, if you already have a lot of daily energy, than you might not want to measure that - you might prefer to measure other things that are more important to you at your current stage of life.

Take time to design your list, then chart your progress in a daily journal every day for each of the categories on your list. Then take an average for the whole day, and write that average at the top of your page.


by : Christopher Guerriero

Take A Serious Look At Your Body Fat

There are many diets and fitness programs out there that are concerned with one thing: how you look. They are centered around the idea that in order to be attractive and valuable you must be thin. These diets and fitness plans are merely ploys to get people to spend money on the latest fad out of a guarentee that they will lose weight instantly and never gain it back while eating their favorite desserts and not lifting a finger. Those plans just don't work. In fact, they can do even more damage than good. As a fitness trainer, I consider one of my most important tasks to be informing people about the truths about health. People need to learn that their body fat levels are much more important than their weight.

As people are so consumed with their weight and their physical appearance, naturally little time is given to caring about actual symbols of health such as percentage of body fat or muscle mass. I find that this is one of the hugest truths about health that need to be firmly planted into people's minds. Why? Because body fat levels say a lot about the actual composition of our bodies and hence about our actual levels of health. Some of the thinnest people in the world have high body fat levels because they eat very little and they do no fitness routines to build and maintain muscle. So while they may be tiny, they are not strong nor are they healthy by any true standard.

Watching your body fat levels can happen in a variety of ways. An important first step is to get a simple test done that will reveal your current body fat percentage. It is a good idea to meet with a physician or a fitness trainer and discuss a plan of seeing your body fat percentage lessen to be in normal range. Making a goal and a plan for how to reach your goal is one of the best ways of attaining anything to do with health.

So take a serious look at your body fat percentage. Begin to watch what you eat. Add lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and replace sugar-filled drinks with water. Those two changes paired with an increase of exercise will have you feeling and seeing results in no time. Your level of body fat does not have to be your enemy. Use your body fat level as an inspiration to get into the best shape of your life for the rest of your life.



By: Julee Mitchelsin

Body Fat Do You Have Too Much

Body fat is an important issue of your overall health. Reducing your body fat is important, because too much body fat can make you more prone to serious health difficulties, such as a heart attack or a stroke. It can also drain your energy and create problems with your movement. There are ways to reduce your body fat percentage that don't require a serious diet or a lucrative program that costs thousands of dollars. All it takes is a little bit of creativity and some willpower.

One of the first things you should do is to figure out your body fat percentage. You can find this out through a number of methods, but an exact number representing your body fat percentage is usually quite hard to discern, and your doctor can provide numbers that are more accurate in a few minutes. It involves an equation and finding out your average density.

If an individual is serious about reducing body fat, the first place to start is body fat measurement. This evaluation may not be a great ego booster, but it is a good motivator. If an individual has dangerously high body fat, a drastic change in lifestyle might be necessary, and this may be the push he or she needs to make a change and get healthy. The body fat measurement can be used as a guide to put one on the right path to better health.

Replace Food with Better Food

One of the first things you should do is to replace rice, pasta and breads with vegetables. This isn't like the Atkins diet, in which you drop the carbohydrates in your diet. This technique replaces a type of carbohydrate with another type of carbohydrate, providing your diet with a better way to burn them altogether. Fruits and veggies are better fat burners than rice, pasta and breads, so they will help you reduce your body fat.

Drink Water

Next, drink plenty of water each day. Consuming a lot of water actually makes it harder for the fat to stick to your body, allowing you to lose body fat and keep it off. Water also flushes your body out and removes harmful toxins, creating a better body system with which to fight off body fat. Water also raises your energy level, if you drink enough of it, and can improve your concentration.

Resistance Training

If you add some light resistance training to your workout and you do it before you do any cardio, you'll find that you will have an easier time with your goal to lose body fat. This occurs because your body does not actually burn fat for the first portion of your exercise, so it is better to allow your body to warm up to lose body fat. Elevate your heart rate by doing some light training, then go forward with the whole routine.

A proper diet, keeping well hydrated and regular exercise are excellent and cost-efficient ways to improve health without spending large amounts of money. Expensive diets and special programs to reduce body fat percentage are not required to lose weight, but creativity and a genuine commitment are. If an individual is serious about losing body fat and is willing to put in the time and energy toward doing so, then that's already one foot on the road to better health.



By: Gary Holdon

A Scale With a Body Fat Monitor Weighs In as the Best Kind to Have1 10

Those on the long road to weight loss have often used a weighing scale as their guide. After all, their main goal is to lose weight. But a scale weighs every bit of you your fat, bones, muscle, what you just ate or drank and ultimately, the number that appears on your weighing scale is not the most important number.

A more important number a number that means more in terms of overall health is your percent body fat. As most of us have heard, muscle indeed weighs more than fat. A regular scale may show a person that he has remained the same weight after weeks of working out, and this can be very upsetting and slightly askewed news.

A weighing scale with a body fat monitor, on the other hand, may show that same person that although he is the same size, his percent body fat has gone down! His muscle has replaced his fat, and this is even better than losing weight.

These days, anyone who is interested in weight loss practically needs to be a mathematician. There are just so many numbers to deal with calorie counting, grams of fat in food, weight, percent body fat, hours of exercise, etc. One of the most important numbers, though, is the percent body fat. Luckily, these days, people can check out their percent body fat from the comfort of their own homes, at the same time they are weighing themselves.

The newest and best sort of scale to have today is one with a body fat monitor. An even better weighing scale to have is one with a body water monitor, too many people are mildly to moderately dehydrated these days, and they do not even know it. A body water monitor can help them keep on top of hydration, thereby improving their overall health.

So, how does a scale measure your body fat and water levels? Bioelectrical Impedance (BIA). A person stands on the foot pads of his scale, barefoot. A low-level electrical signal is passed up through one foot, and exits through the other foot. The BIA scale measures the resistance of this electrical signal as it travels through the persons body.

Water conducts electricity, and fat contains very little water. Muscle, on the other hand, is around 70% water. Therefore, the faster the signal travels through your body, the more muscle you have.

The BIA scale is not the most accurate fat-measuring device (it has a 4% margin of error), but it is accurate enough for most people, and it is very easy to use. The results of a BIA scale can be affected by simple things like your hydration, the food youve eaten, and even your skin temperature. Weigh yourself after drinking a glass of water your percent body fat shows as higher if you are dehydrated.

So, if you are looking to lose weight, consider trying to lose body fat instead, and keep track of it on a scale with a body fat monitor.

Note: It is recommended that anyone who has and internal electronic medical device like a pacemaker should not use the fat reading feature of one of these scales


By Anne Clarke

How To Measure Body Fat At Home

In order to maintain a healthy weight management program, you need to know how to measure your body fat accurately. Most people will simply step on a weighing scale at home, read the numbers and exclaimed, Arrrrrgh! I have put on extra 2 kilos and I need to lose those extra weight I have gained.

You know what? Body fat measurement on a weighing scale is unreliable. If you lose weight, how would you know that you were not losing fat but muscles, or water, or the food you have eaten? Or if you have put on weight, could it be from the muscle weight you have worked so hard for? Or could it be the heavy meal you have eaten or from the beer you have just drunk?

So your weight will fluctuate if you use the bathroom weighing scale as your body fat measurement. Then what is the best method of weight measurements can you measure your body fat more accurately?

Well, most methods of body fat weight measurement have their pros and cons but are usually better than the simple bathroom scales in measuring body fat percentages. Although not the best, here are two of the more common body fat measurement methods for effective weight management which you can do at home.

Body Mass Index Measurement (BMI)

Body Mass Index body fat measurement method take your weight and height into consideration that will give you an indication of whether you are obese and overweight or in a great body shape. It is a calculation formula: BMI = kg/m2

A healthy BMI score is between 18 and 25. A score below 18 indicates that you may be underweight; a value above 25 indicates that you may be overweight.

However, BMI weight measurement method may not be accurate if you are an athlete or a bodybuilder with more muscle mass than an average person.

Waist To Hip Measurement

Waist to hip method of body fat measurement is thought to be much more important than the BMI method. This is because it measures visceral fat which are normally accumulated in the abdominal area and can also be found in the organs which are considered more dangerous than normal body fat.

To measure your waist to hip ratio, measure your waist at your navel and your hips at its widest point (usually at the butt cheeks) then divide your waist by your hips. Your waist to hip measurement should be 0.92 or lower. More than that would mean that you are accumulating more visceral and body fat in that area and is an indication of susceptibility to obesity related diseases.

If you find that remembering formulae and number crunching being complicated, there are equipment you can buy to help you measure your body fat at home for your weight management program such as calipers and electronic body fat percentage calculator.

Armed with more accurate body fat measurement, then you can plan your weight management program more effectively whether to lose extra weight or gain healthy weight.

by : Chris Chew