carorees wrote: Congrats on your superb weight loss. Looking at your pics and stats I'd say you look good! Your BMI is healthy. I think @kencc says that a BMI of 22 is considered ideal. But of course BMI is such a crude measure. Your fat% is perhaps a tad low even for a man. Out of interest how did you feel at 15% fat? My OH looks just a little less skinny and our scales say his fat% is 15%...your pics suggest our scales aren't too far out!
Anyway, ignore the critics...only you know at what weight you feel best, and you've certainly made a great transformation.
Hi Carorees, Thanks! Regarding fat %, I've been reading a bodybuilder who happened to have advocated something very similar to 5:2 before 5:2 came along (he calls it Eat Stop Eat) called Brad Pilon (
http://bradpilon.com/), who is quite scientific, and makes sense to me. He says "I suggest body fat levels no higher than 15% for men and 25% for women. Since most people don’t know their body fat percentages, my other suggestion is to always keep your waist circumference less than 50% of your height." And what he does himself is stay 10-12% ("On the odd occasion where I am under 10% body fat, I'll only fast once per week, but any other time it's once or twice a week that holds me between 10 and 12% body fat. If for some weird reason I sneak above 12%* then I increase my fasting back to twice a week."). So for him 'lean' is below 15% for men.
I also have my fat % tested occasionally using a BodPod (which accurately measures your volume and works out your fat% reasonably well as well as calculating your lean body mass (I've never used scales and have no idea how accurate they are for this), and their chart at
http://portlandbodpod.com/bod-pod-weight-chart describes:
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Risky (high body fat) - Men >30%; Women >40%
Excess Fat - Men 21-30%; Women 31-40%
Moderately Lean - Men 13-20%; Women 23-30%
Lean- Men 9-12%; Women 19-22%
Ultra Lean - Men 5-8%; Women 15-18%
Risky (low body fat) - Men <5%; Women <15%
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The precise details don't matter in that people will argue, but the main points for me were:
- women require ~10% more fat than men
- for a man 10-12% is healthy and quite fit, and I was curious to see how that looked (as I was losing weight anyway, why not go there and see?; I could always revert).
Nothing wrong with 15%, but at the weight I still had a pad of fat over my stomach, and again I was curious to see when this disappeared. Also I wanted to maintain a few pounds lower than my upper limit, so I'm playing with 10-12% being my lower and upper limits at the moment.
The other point about % fat is that if I now add muscle and no fat, my fat % will fall, so I could be at the same fat % as someone else, but look different - so this is also crude, and just a guideline.