Are you overweight or overfat | Why your scale is lying to you. Overweight vs overfat - Overweight vs Obese. Am I Overweight or Overfat?. Your Scale May Be Lying To You. How the Scale is Lying to You. I'm sure you've had times when you thought your scale had gone crazy.
Ways the Scale Deceives You | It can be hard to accept you're doing the right things, if the scale isn't backing you up. And daily weigh-ins can drive you crazy because the scale is flawed.
Are you overweight or overfat?
Individuals who are considered "overfat" have excess fat, regardless of weight or BMI measurements. You may be storing unhealthy amounts of body fat even if your weight appears normal.
For decades, the body mass index (BMI) has been the gold standard for gauging obesity-related heart disease risk. But this handy tool doesn't always tell the whole story. It extrapolates your body fat percentage based on your height and weight. But the formula can't assess how or where your body stores its excess fat — a distinction that is crucial for cardiovascular health. By some estimates, the BMI misclassifies nearly 50% of people who are at higher disease risk from excess fat, meaning that you can be overfat even when you're not overweight.
"Weight and fat are not the same".
The only thing the scale can do is measure your total body weight.
Don't trust the scale. You've heard it before. But, really, do yourself a favor and don't listen to its insidious lies.
"Overfat": The Health Case Against Bathroom Scales
I weighed myself every hour for the entire bank holiday weekend. Here’s what I found out.
For a long time now I’ve been weighing myself daily, but I realised early on that the numbers you see when you step on the scales are almost always nonsense. Weight measurements are like opinion polls – individual results don’t tell you anything because there’s just too much random noise, error and variation. It’s only when you have a few dozen that you can start to reliably pick out a trend.
But that noise made me curious. It’s easy to chalk up weight gains and losses to hidden forces or semi-scientific concepts like ‘starvation mode’, but when you do that you lose a sense of control. Understanding is power, and I wanted to understand what my body did over the course of a single day that caused my weight to vary so much from one morning to the next.
So over the bank holiday weekend, I conducted a little unscientific experiment on myself. I weighed myself every waking hour, from 6pm on Friday to 9am on Tuesday, and assumed a constant rate of change overnight to interpolate the missing hours of sleep.
I recorded to the gram the amount that I ate and drank, and even the quantity of urine that I passed (I estimated the, er, other stuff – I do have some dignity), and I recorded all the exercise I did, weighing myself before and after walks and runs. The result was a glorious spreadsheet showing exactly what happened to my body hour-by-hour over nearly ninety hours.
So what did I find?
Conclusion number one is that weighing yourself every hour is a really bloody depressing exercise. It turns out that an hour is a very short period of time, and having an alarm go off every hour from 9am to 1am very quickly becomes Not At All Fun. It also meant I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone, but then bank holiday weekends are nearly always hateful experiences so I wasn’t missing much.
Worse, the act of weighing myself changed my behaviour no matter how hard I tried to resist it. If you know you’re about to weigh yourself in ten minutes, and that drinking a glass of water is going to add up to a pound to that weight, you’ve got a big incentive to feel a bit less thirsty. And if you’re going to the bathroom every hour on the hour, you may as well.. you get the picture. By Saturday night I was in danger of sinking into a sort of miserable hourly drink-pee-weigh cycle.
So this is far from perfect as far as science goes, but it still produced some interesting results.
The first surprise was just the sheer amount of mass involved. In three-and-a-bit days I consumed a massive 14.86kgs of stuff – about 33lbs. That was made up of 3.58kgs of food and 11.28kgs of drink (including 700 grams of a nice red). That’s way, way, way higher than I expected.
In spite of taking in all that stuff, I finished the experiment 1.86 kilos lighter than when I started. That means my body got rid of a staggering 16.72kgs of mass over the long weekend. 7.4kgs of that was accounted for by urine, and an estimated 1.8kgs by, well, crap, but that still leaves a whopping 7.52 kilos of mass that just vanished into thin air. Where did it go?
Some of it disappeared when I went running. I went out for two 5k runs on the Sunday and Monday, and between them I lost well over a kilogram in sweat. Some of the 11-plus kilos of fluids I took in over the weekend were spent replacing all that water I leaked out of my skin. Even accounting for that though, every hour it seemed my weight was slightly less than it should have been. On average, I lost 69 grams every single hour that couldn’t be explained by anything I’d measured. Over the whole weekend, that added up to nearly six kilos of unexplained weight loss, 1.65kgs every 24 hours.
In fact, I really was evaporating into thin air. Humans breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide – oxygen plus a carbon atom. All those carbon atoms have to come from somewhere, and they add up pretty quickly – over the course of a day, with a good work out thrown in, someone my size breathes out maybe half a kilo of carbon.
Our breathe also carries water vapour, which accounts for about the same amount again; and we’re also leaking water from our skin – another half kilo or so evaporating every day.
Add them together, and it explains the mystery weight loss pretty much perfectly. It also reveals another surprising truth; that when it comes to ditching mass from your body the anus really does bring up the rear end. My penis, lungs and skin all managed to outperform my posterior when it came to taking out the trash. In fact only last year a study found that much of the fat you shift when you lose weight departs via your lungs.
None of this is massively surprising of course, but what I think it shows is just how unreliable any single measurement of weight is.
On any given day my weight varied by about four pounds, with a dozen pounds passing in and out of the giant meat tube that is me at only vaguely predictable times. When you consider that a sensible weight loss target is maybe 0.25lbs per day, you can see how on most days that’s just going to be swallowed up in the noise. While I was generally lighter in the mornings and heavier after meals as you’d expect, my exact weight at any moment was really just a crap shoot. Only by looking at a long-term view, over many days, would it be possible to see the genuine trend.
So how do you figure out how much you weigh?
Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of weighing yourself weekly – it’s just not enough data for you to know what’s really happening.
Weigh yourself every morning, but ignore the number that comes up on the scales. Instead take the average of the last seven days (preferably ten or fourteen), and after several weeks look at how that average is changing over time. That’s where the real truth lies.
Are you 'overfat'?
With two-thirds of Americans either overweight or obese, it has become "normal" to have excess body fat, but this "overfat" condition poses serious health risks.
Is your scale lying to you And the answer is-sort of.
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