On the Road

My "travel journal" on the road to self-discipline.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Weight based on body fat percentage

Ever since my doctor's appointment, I've been thinking about markers of health--blood pressure and iron levels. Of course, my health approach is to focus on RDA's through fitday rather than count calories or restrict food groups and this is also tied to markers of health. Other ones that I have been thinking about are body fat percentage, resting heart rate, and cholesterol level. In a way, I wish that ways to measure these things were as common in our homes as the scale seems to be, because weight seems to be a measure of health that can be more subjective and less related to health than these other measures (based on what little I know about them).

During the summer, I'm going to try to find out some more of my health markers. I will likely buy a heart rate monitor soon and I'm planning on going to the gym and paying the couple of bucks it is to have my body fat percentage measured. Maybe the health center offers cholesterol screenings. Also, I was reading about blood pressure and found that the NIH suggests that sodium be restricted to 2400 mg a day. I'm about 100 mg above that usually, so I am going to look into reducing that, even though my blood pressure isn't that high. Another reason to cut out Cokes!

Also, I looked at the body fat percentage calculator here and based on its calculations, I have 32% body fat. (I'm using the smaller number.) So, based on my current weight I have nearly 50 pounds of fat on me and the rest of me weighs about 105. If I aim for the "ideal" body fat percentage for fit women (22%), I think that would mean that nothing less than 127.8 would be healthy for me (assuming I don't become an "athlete" which is probably a safe assumption). Is that right? 104.7 *22%= about 23, 104.7 + 23 = 127.8. Math is like Klingon to me, so I may have made a glaring error in judgment, but I think that should be right. I think that this is probably more accurate than plain BMI.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for today!

1 Comments:

  • At 3:42 PM, Blogger t. said…

    Hey! one short consideration about cholesterole. My mother suffer from ipercholesterolemy (did I spell that right???) and needs to keep that monitored. Well, she discovered rencetly, she does not need a full blood test or a regular blood test at all to check that: she get it tested in a pharmacy! You go in, with a needle pen they take just a drop of blood from you and they give you the results right away! Pretty neat we all thought! OR probably I think so because, despite not afraid of needles, blood tests are nightmares for me: my veins are too thin and they collapse on the needle. Therefore 3-7 holes for one single test!!!!

    P.S. I think you did the math right!

     

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