I personally haven't got to that point to figure it out, however, I logically know a woman shouldn't dip below 12% body fat (competition body building), and the average healthy woman should be approximately between 15% to 18% body fat. The body mass index (BMI) states an average healthy woman is around 25%, but science and medicine are both finding out the BMI rating has serious flaws - it has calculated professional athletes to be grossly overweight because it doesn't have a way to differentiate between lean muscle weight and fat weight. The new standard being used is the hip to waist ratio, which you can calculate here.
One other method is to buy a set of digital fat calipers, which can be found online for as low as $60, in addition to the old standby, the tape measure. Using both these tools can help you not only to track your physical progress, but show you what your eyes and mindset don't tell you. When you think you look fat, pull out the tools and check with facts, not with feelings or impressions.
There's another benefit to getting the facts: you tend to feel emotionally stable, which means you're less apt to slip into old emotional eating habits and patterns. How many times have you thought you looked fat, and then self-destructed by sitting down to eat a whole bag of chips, or a huge slice of cake? If you intellectually know you're turning into the incredible shrinking “you”, there's a huge emotional boost that will give you the willpower to walk away from the comfort foods of the past.
The scale is going by the wayside for many people, and to tell you the truth, I haven't missed mine much. There's always a little pang of curiosity out there, but not enough to make me run out and buy another one. We've been trained like a Pavlovian dog to worship the scale number, but there are skinny looking people who have little muscle and carrying around a lot of fat.
Maybe as women, we're just trained to always see fat. I was talking with my brother, and he was laughing over something I had said. “Only a former fat person can motivate and help another fat person get skinny. I've spent years on and off with personal trainers, never getting lasting results, and always looking at the skinny trainer thinking, "you"ve never been fat, have you?” Then he agreed and said the only fat some of these women have on their bodies is in their lips - the “botox fat”.
A study I had read about the average man was quite interesting. It said in so many words men don't “see” fat on their frames. In some ways that's good - women might get scared if they started asking, “Does this make my butt look big?” Men aren't spending all of their time obsessing over their physical attributes…just ours, and hoping to catch what they see like a cat sitting on top of an aquarium. In other ways, it's bad because men are less likely to change poor lifestyle habits that are detrimental to their longevity.
Now there are always exceptions to the rule - some men are too heavy and admit to it, and some women lick ice cubes for dinner and then run off to vomit up the “calories”. Wouldn't it just be nice if we could really see ourselves as we truly are, instead of always thinking the mirrors in our homes were stolen out of a circus fun house?
I'm learning weight loss is equally physical as well as mental. If you don't readjust your inner voice, you'll never lose the mental image of who you worked so hard not to be.
Find all parts of this series as well as helpful diet and exercise tools and news here.
