Correct Body Measurement

 I would like to underline a few principles about the way we measure our weight. To do this we first need to establish just what the importance of weight is.

Weight is actually the force of the gravitational pull on the body and is measured in newtons – this is not what people talk about when referring to their weight. What they are really concerned about is their mass which is measured in kilograms, and refers to the amount of matter that a body is made up of. So to follow on from that fact, surely any change in mass is brought about by a change in the amount of matter that our body is composed of. Wrong. This brings us on to an important aspect when we are considering how heavy we are – density of materials.

The body is made up of over 100 different tissues and to accurately measure all of them in a person is almost impossible. The way we are going to get around this is to split the body into 2 compartments – fat mass and fat free mass. The reason that density is important is that these two compartments that we have seperated have different densities, fat mass has a fixed density of 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter, while fat free mass has an estimated density of 1.1. With this in mind we can see that weight is not quite as one dimensional when studied in relation to health as previously thought. For example, if we have two people of the same size with different weights, the heavier of the two is not necessarily fatter or more unhealthy because we are unsure about the percentages of fat mass and fat free mass. This needs to be kept in mind when we are considering how healthy we are, because a simple weighing technique or a BMI measure does not tell us how healthy our body is.There are ways of measuring levels of fat and muscle, but they require more than just a simple set of scales.The first way is to use bioelectrical impedance analysis, which can be done by standing barefoot on a pair of bioelectrical scales. These can be purchased from lots of stores and are only slightly more expensive than an ordinary pair of scales, working by passing an electrical current through the body and coomparing the time taken for the current to reach its destination with the known knowledge of the conductance of body tissues.The second way of measuring the composition of the body to more accurately assess your health is to measure skin folds. This involves using a pair of calibrated callipers (which can be quite expensive) and then taking skinfold measurements from various sites around the body and using various equations (which can be easily obtained) to work out the percentage body fat mass, and the fat free mass. The third method I am going to talk about is used to calculate the bone mass of the body. This is done by taking measurements of various bone breadths around the body (for example at the elbow and knee). These measurements can then be used along with the skinfolds in various equations to find the bone mass of the body.These three methods that are commonly used by health services to assess body compositions more accurately than simple weighing scales because they offer a greater insight into the health of the person than if only their weight is taken into account. I am well aware that these facilities are not available for everyone but please do take into account when worrying about your weight that it does not tell the whole story – the composition of your body is just as important as your weight.