Ep 194 – Why Body Fat Measurement Methods Suck

TRANSCRIPT:

Ben:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. I’m Ben.

Giacomo:

And I’m Giacomo.

Ben:

And this is episode 194. It’s been a whirlwind of past couple weeks, especially for you and Dani. You know, I was part of that on the front end. With everything that happened at Plant built and the Mr. America competition, and getting to witness that and be a part of it was inspiring, honestly, to say the least. And I think I came away from that with an extra skip in my step or just like a.

Just a little bit. Just like, seeing all the amazing athletes and how passionate they are and how they’re carrying out that same mission across all of the sports that we competed in and showed up and showed out at the Mr. America. And I think it was funny when you and were having the car podcast and talking about how, like, oh, do they know, like, this team of vegans is coming?

And so people just are not, like, they’re like, I don’t want a part of that anymore and scaring away the competition. But, no, I. I think. I think it’s. It’s good to welcome the competition, the friendly competition. I think people who are true competitors want that. They want the best of the best because they want to be able to prove themselves on the highest level.

So, yeah, just getting to witness all the amazing athletes across all the sports was something that I am still kind of riding the high from and hoping to kind of carry that momentum and just, yeah, honestly, just like, feeling very fulfilled after that. Tired. Because I’m an introvert at nature in. In a pretty extreme sense, but it was. It was. It was a great time.

Giacomo:

And you’re not the only introvert. It’s a team environment, though, so everyone’s open because it’s a collective, and we’re doing it for the same reason. And we’re, y’all. We all have. How do I say? We’re there for the same purpose. Right? So it’s just much easier to hang out and to connect, even in ways that it’s uncomfortable for someone.

Right. Because if you’re introverted and you’re in a big crowd like that, that’s kind of your worst nightmare. But if you’re the. As the saying goes, like, so bad. Even the introverts are here. So good. Even the introverts are here. Right. And I felt like just on the whole, it just keeps getting better and better how we all get together and do our thing.

That said, I am curious to see what the competition looks like at FitFest in August of next year because there wasn’t enough competition there and I don’t trust that there will be for specific teams like Powerlifting. So it’ll be interesting because we’ll divide the team in half and the other half will go to Fit Fest in August. And outside of that, I’m already losing my train of thought because like you, I’m just still like swept up in that moment.

But now I remember. And when we’re done filming today, Dani and I are going to make our way to New York City. We’ll be at the Expo for the New York City Marathon and that’ll be the very first time our camera crew just delivered the short, the three minutes where we captured the moment on a video of exactly what we did from start to finish. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s sitting in my inbox waiting for me to look at and proof.

But we’re going to throw that up on a monitor at the Expo and then we’re going to run that on Loop while 100,000 people pass by. And many thousands of those people will stop and have conversations with us and see what the team did and be inspired. And then we’ll get to do that again and again in 2025. I can’t imagine what that’s going to feel like in a couple of days, but I am very excited for all that.

Ben:

And I wonder because I’ve seen some news about how the, I mean, the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, he’s vegan and so he’s implemented some policies there, like the New York City hospitals having plant based meals be the default across all of their hospitals. So I wonder if some of these initiatives are starting to open people’s mind up to the idea that things are changing, the tides are turning a little bit.

And so I think there probably will be a lot of curiosity and people coming up to ask questions because maybe they’ve heard about it, they’ve heard some of this news. The seeds have been planted a little bit and they’re curious and now they have someone in front of them who is giving away information and providing that. And I think that New York City, like, it’s a, it’s a melting pot of so many different people.

And I think that that is kind of a, a awesome place to, you know, plant your flag and say, like, let’s see what kind of impact we can make here when we’re gonna have so many little interactions and nurturing those seeds that have been planted already.

Giacomo:

We have tabled many times in New York City. But for vegan proteins, never for vegan strong. This is a totally different message that we’re putting out there in a larger than life kind of way. And we’ve been putting out there for the past six years. So I’m genuinely curious to see what kind of impact that makes in that particular city as opposed to the other places that we’ve been going to.

So I’m just super excited about this upcoming trip and really grateful to be able to see all the work that we did together play out in real time at the next expo that we go to.

Ben:

Especially because the crowd is already going to be people who are kind of pre selected to be somewhat into fitness training with the marathon going on. And I think I’ve seen that people in that realm, it can go two ways, right? There can be the people who are so entrenched in whatever nutrition or dietary approach that they’re currently doing that they’re not open to it. But I think most people are open to wanting to incorporate, eat more plants and they’re just not sure the

practical ways of how to do that. So I think that you’re already kind of by bringing, okay, these are all these amazing vegan athletes that we were able to. And look what we were able to do. You’re speaking kind of to the people that you who are maybe open minded to that enough to make a change and implement that into their regimen and try it out. So I’m excited to see what comes of that too.

Giacomo:

Same here. But that’s not what we’re actually talking about today. We’re talking about body fat measuring and the number itself. This is a hot topic still after all these years and I feel like the data and the research is out there and I don’t want to skip to the end of the story here, what we’re talking about. But obviously this is worth a conversation. How would you start the conversation on the topic of body fat scans, body fat percentage, what makes the most sense to you?

Ben:

I think we can tie it into what we were just talking about with athletic performance and talking about why do people care about body fat in the first place? And I think one of the reasons is for sport, for athletics. And then we can kind of maybe dive into more of like the health and aesthetics after that. Because that is something that we deal with very much so on a daily basis with clients and just seeing in the athletes that we work with.

But I think first it’s important to look at the fact that across a variety of sports, there are a variety of body fat percentages. And what performance means to you is sport dependent, individual dependent and context dependent. For instance, let’s take sumo at the extreme. These individuals are intentionally heavier and have higher body fat percentages because it is facilitative to their sport.

Kind of an interesting sidebar is that there’s been some research carried out where sumo wrestlers have on average the highest total amount of muscle mass out of any athletes. Which is kind of cool to think about. Like, what if all of that came off? Like, of course you’re going to lose some muscle with that. But they’d, they’d be really jacked and muscular.

And so the reason that they have higher body fat percentages. And then if you look at something like an American football team, you see that kind of play out across all the positions. You have the linemen who are heavier and they just need more mass because mass moves mass. Then you have kind of the skill positions like the wide receivers and the cornerbacks.

And these guys are lean, you know, some of them walking around at single digit body fat. Because there is something to be said about having less weight to carry around, meaning that you can be more explosive and more dynamic. And just when you think about the physics of it, you look at something like a sprinter. A lot of the Olympic sprinters are quite lean because again, just makes them more aerodynamic and more able to perform for their sport.

So I think first off, there’s no one body fat percentage that is more athletic than another, per se. Um, you know, there, I think in general we can say that lower body fat percentages tend to be more aligned with cardio, maybe improved cardiovascular performance. Because, you know, some of the heavier strength sports where it is advantageous to have more body fat, you don’t have the same cardiovascular demands that like a runner or a sprinter would have.

So that body fat isn’t necessarily holding them back, it’s actually facilitative. But you know, you know, more cardio based sports, probably not the case. Swimmers, runners, bikers, et cetera, they tend to, you know, walk around a little bit leaner. So it’s context dependent. Anything that you kind of wanted to add to that conversation?

Giacomo:

I like where you’re going with different body types and different sports and redefining what it means to have an athletic body fat, this percentage. Because the whole thing can be deconstructed and be like, yeah, it’s BS, like 10 to 15% for a man and what is it, 17 to 22% for a woman. Woman. I mean, it is context dependent and that’s not fair to other sports where they are athletic.

They just need to be at a different body type and body composition of a different amount of body fat. That being said, my mind immediately goes to what is healthy versus unhealthy for someone for their overall health. But then of course I check myself and I say, well, competing in general is unhealthy whether you’re at a lower body fat percentage or higher body fat percentage.

So it’s all relative, but I would like to think that you cross a certain line whether it’s lower or higher outside of what we call a quote unquote athletic body fat percentage. And the further you move away from those numbers, the unhealthier you stand to become. At least that’s what I’m thinking. What’s your opinion on that?

Ben:

I would generally agree with that. I think this kind of. Well, first talking about the fact that just because somebody looks fit doesn’t mean that they actually are fit. You consider a bodybuilder who’s shredded, a lot of people would be like, oh, you know, that’s got to be like the fittest person ever. In reality, he’s probably somewhere like a crossfitter who has a good amount of like cardiovascular endurance and you know, also strength.

But then you have to ask yourself, is health just physical health or is it also like, you know, because CrossFit, you’re training multiple times a day, many hours, it’s an extreme stress that you’re putting on your body. So I think any sport to the extreme is probably not the healthiest that we can be. But it also depends how you define health.

What is health for you? Is health living a long life is health being able to perform well in your sport? Is health having flexibility with social events? Because maybe that’s really important to you. But if you’re trying to maintain single digit body fat and you’re not able to have that social flexibility, then maybe your overall health is suffering.

Even if your physical health is maybe, you know, in your mind being improved. So that’s kind of where my mind goes with that. I also think about the whole idea of there being like an optimal or ideal body fat percentage and people getting really caught up in that and wanting to know what their body fat is like, the amount of people who, you know, what do you think my body fat is?

What is, what does that mean? Like, what would I, you know, sometimes it is facilitative, like they’re trying to figure out, okay, if I wanted to compete in bodybuilding what would that mean that my stage weight would be? And kind of working that backwards. So sometimes that can help. But I think for a lot of people it’s kind of just like this obsession with data and numbers where it’s like I need to know because I care about the objective facts and I want to know this number because.

Because. Just because. Because it gives me some amount of certainty or feeling of objectivity. But in reality, which we’ll get into in a little bit, there isn’t a way to 100 with 100% accuracy or even with like a high degree of accuracy, use one of these tools to assess your body fat percentage. Unless you are someone is literally dead, it’s a cadaver and you go in and dissect all the parts and figure out what’s the proportion of lean mass to not.

That’s literally the only way to be like 100% objective about it or as close as you can be. Um, and I often think that a coach’s trained eye is better than all of the assessment tools that we have out there, including something like a dexa, Bodpod, et cetera. So I did also want to talk on, touch on the idea of like body fat set points and ranges, because I think that kind of ties into here and like, what’s sustainable for you.

I know we’re getting a little bit away from like the assessment piece, but I wanted to kind of, you know, tap you in here and see if there was anything that you had to add on the points that I just brought up.

Giacomo:

I feel like this is one of those things where there’s no clear cut answer because I think some of it is in genetic, some of it as in you were born a certain way, you have a certain metabolism, you have a certain ability to have a threshold as far as like how comfortable you are at different body weight and body fat set points. So I think that is true.

I think it is also lifestyle dependent. How you’ve lived your life, the body that you’ve built just by living in your body, from being a baby to childhood to your teenage years to your adult years. I think it is lifestyle dependent also in the context of the kind of stress that you put on yourself and the kind of stress the world puts on you. And then finally the one part here that I feel like despite all of these things, which some are changeable, like you can change your lifestyle, you

can choose to change your lifestyle to some degree of some control over that, but I think where you can in fact manipulate your body weight set Point and your body composition to a degree. I think it takes a long period of time. Is behavior. Behavior. Not just habit change, but behavioral change. How you feel in your own body for longer periods of time.

Right. And how you react and respond to how it feels to be hungry. That is all relative. And I feel like. I also want to say that that is a bit insensitive because some people are coming from a different starting point or right. And some of it is obviously not their fault. However, I do feel like anyone is capable of changing their body weight and body composition set point. Not just by means of how much muscle they’re able to put on and what their habits are like.

And with time passing, also with how they react and respond to their hunger cues, hunger signals. And you know, that’s something that I’m constantly experimenting on with my clients and with myself, for example. So this is where I don’t have a clear cut answer, but I think there is possibility there.

Ben:

I’m gonna. I’m gonna bring some research into this. This is something that I have become more familiar with over the past couple years. Different models and theories of body fat set points, settling points. So I think for a while there was this idea that everyone has this kind of inherent biologically programmed body fat percentage that your body likes to be around.

And maybe it’s a little bit higher or a little bit lower at times, but, you know, there’s this kind of programmed set point and that’s what you’re meant to be. And I think there’s some grain. There’s a grain of truth to that. But I think one of the more. One of the models that I hear being talked about more is called the dual intervention model, which is this idea that everybody has a lower and higher intervention point, which essentially means that between those two points, the thing

that dictates whether you’ll be on the lower end of that body fat range or the higher end of that body fat body fat range are, is environment, lifestyle factors, behavior modification, the things that are more within our control. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t. Like once you start getting more to those extremes, the more that your body starts to push back on you, your physiology starts to push back on you.

And we can kind of take this and contextualize this to, let’s say individuals who are obese. They probably have both of these things shifted towards that weight, like their lower intervention point, the point at which they start getting really hungry, lethargic, tired, rundown that might be at, you know, for a male 20, 25% body fat. Whereas for someone like you or me, maybe it’s closer to 10 or 15% body fat.

And then for people who are competitive bodybuilders, excel at their sport, Maybe that’s like 6 or 7% body fat. I think, you know, we’re familiar with examples of people who just seem to kind of walk around, like, really lean and don’t have a, you know, they actually have trouble eating and eating enough food for their goals. Maybe they’re trying to be in a caloric surplus to put on weight.

Their upper intervention point is probably lower than some, you know, somebody. And then that’s, I think, how we can contextualize these individuals who get up to 400, 500, 600 pounds, really, you know, substantial amounts of adiposity. It’s because that higher intervention point is just so far out there that the, you know, their, their behaviors and lifestyles, lifestyle can keep pushing them along that way, and their body’s not fighting back.

Whereas, like, someone potentially like you or me. And I think this starts to get into, like, people who are like, all personal responsibility, like, everyone can, you know, like, you know, if I can do it, the single mom of three can do it. And it starts to get. You start to roll your eyes like you were there because you just realized that someone like you or me is realistically, like, our physiology is probably more tailored to, you know, what we’re good at, which is bodybuilding.

It’s probably why we found it where you gravitated towards it. Whereas somebody who maybe has struggled with their weight their entire life, maybe they have some genetic proclivities now, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t work their way towards that lower intervention point and become healthier and better versions of themselves.

And I think that that is why it’s important to still say we have control over our actions and our behaviors and our health. That doesn’t mean that everyone is at the same starting point. Everybody has the same resources. And so I think it just comes with the territory as coaches of being compassionate towards the individuals that we work with and understanding that not everyone starts at the same place and people are dealing with unique challenges that maybe you don’t have the

understanding with, you haven’t experienced firsthand. And a lot of coaches make this mistake of thinking that what they did worked for them is going to work for somebody else and that what they experience, everybody experiences. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Giacomo:

Exactly. And someone’s motive could supersede what they look like or what they’re capable of doing too. So you have to be careful when you judge someone by what they look like or their goal because sometimes they parallel and the person is working towards a goal that they’re more conditioned to be able to work towards. And other times they just really want something really bad, but they’re not very good at it.

But they’re able to work towards like it’s not going to come naturally to them. Yeah, it’s very interesting when you get into the psychology of coaching, as opposed to saying, okay, you look like this, you want to do this, so we’re going to do this. Right. Whether you’re able to eventually see what they’re looking to do over time because you get to know them, or you just have this preconceived idea because you have to judge to start somewhere. And unfortunately, being coachable

doesn’t come naturally either. So that becomes tricky where you have to help your client, especially if they haven’t worked with the coach before, become coachable because you might be getting the wrong feedback from them. You have to really have to anticipate that. So it’s definitely tricky and challenging to know where to take a client. And it’s definitely not as simple as, well, you look this way and you perform this way and you want to perform this way and. Or look this way.

Ben:

Bringing it kind of back to body fat percentages. When you get a new client and we enter the conversation, when it comes to someone’s body fat percentage, do you find that people are generally overestimating their body fat? Underestimating usually pretty close in the ballpark. And what does that conversation look like? If somebody wants you to assess their body fat for them or they ask you, what’s my body fat percentage? How are you having that conversation with them?

Are you giving them a number? Are you telling them, well, this is my best guess, but. And you’re kind of caveating it and explaining all the reasons why it might not be the most useful measure or assessment. Because I think not only do people want to know the number, but they probably have some sort of notion about how useful that number is and how that plays into the decision making that we have as coaches. And like, you know what trajectory we’re going to take them on.

Giacomo:

It’s tricky because people want measurable progress. It depends on the client. Initially, when I’m talking about testing certain dexes, even though body fat testing in general, I’m just using the one that typically tends to be the most accurate, the most measurable, I should say but you cross a certain line and it’s. I think it’s on the leaner side more so like when someone is.

Has less body fat to lose where the test just becomes completely useless. It just doesn’t even measure anything any more accurately. So if someone has more scale weight to lose and more body fat to lose while they’re well on their way towards achieving their goal, they can look at the changes in the DEXs. And so I don’t really fight that. I don’t try to get in and like over explain like. Yeah. And then when we should we cross the line, I’m like, well, these tests are not really.

They’re just not. You’re just kind of wasting your time, right? So you got to be careful with people’s motivation. You don’t want to. Even if you know that their motivation is coming from a place where it’s not. It’s not going to be effective. Like you don’t want to shoot, you don’t want to shoot them in the foot by D mode on. You know what I mean?

Ben:

Yes, yes. A couple things here. First is that when I was in university studying exercise science, we had a class where we basically used slash implemented as many of these body fat assessment tools as we could. We actually had a DEXA in our lab. We had calipers, which is the thing that you use to kind of pinch, pinch your skin, which can. And you know, if you have the same person doing it and they’re well trained to doing it, can be a pretty decent assessment.

You know, a five site, a three site, a seven site. The tape measure. You can use a tape measure around your waist, which isn’t necessarily the most accurate for body fat percentage because everyone stores a little bit differently. But you know, it can be a good general heuristic bod pod. There’s all these different measures and even dexa, which is considered the gold standard of body composition assessment, is often off by 5 to 10%.

So you could have an initial measurement where it measures you lower for body fat and higher for muscle mass and the next time it’s vice versa. And then you feel like I’ve been, you know, maybe I’ve been working with a coach for all this time or I’ve been putting in all this effort and the DEXA told me that I lost muscle and I gained body fat. And you look at the images and you look at all the data you’ve collected otherwise and it’s clear to us that you have made improvements, you’ve

gotten stronger in the gym you’re leaner, you’re more muscular. Like you can see it in the photos, you can see it in the measurements. And so I think that is what often opens someone’s eyes. I’ve seen to the fact that, okay, maybe this isn’t like the end all be all of tools that tells you whether your progress has been good or not. So I think like you said, like maybe taking a Dexa every 6 to 12 months, maybe you take one at the end of every gaining phase or at the end of every know, dieting

phase every couple years to try to see like the general trends over time. I think like you were saying, because adipose tissue isn’t composed of as much water, it’s kind of fat. Like you think about the analogy of olive oil like sitting on top of water and they’re separate. So body fat cells are mostly body fat, whereas when you’re leaner, it’s mostly just muscle.

And muscle has a ton of water. So those water weight changes can confound some of the data that you get from something like a dexa, which measures kind of like fat free mass. But you don’t know, you know, water is technically fat free mass. So it’s harder to kind of tease apart the differences between actual contractile skeletal muscle tissue.

And just how hydrated are you? How full are your muscles? Are you depleted down? Are you carved up? Have you ate something that morning? Did you not eat something that morning? And there’s standard protocols in place, but all that to say that there’s lots of ways that the data can be skewed. So I think it can be kind of a neat thing to, for people to do.

And like you said, if someone’s really motivated in the thought of getting a DEXA or having a dexa, almost like a goal of like a photo shoot or a competition, like, I’m getting the DEXA on this date. If that kind of like drives somebody to, you know, stick with their habits and behaviors and be really excited, I see that as a positive. As long as they understand that this isn’t going to be necessarily the most accurate tool and like, it has its limitations like anything else, then I

think it’s great. And not shooting it down and not invalidating that as a coach is important, but just, you know, kind of communicating with them and making sure that they understand what are the pros and what are the cons to getting these done. And then if they ask me like, okay, well, you know, if none of these tools are super accurate, what do you think?

What’s what’s my body fat percentage again? People store it different ways. Sometimes it’s harder to tell. Like men tend to store it a little bit more, you know, viscerally like internally, whereas women it’s a little bit more external. So it can be difficult to assess sometimes. Also, not everyone’s comfortable with stripping down to minimal amounts of clothing, which makes it another kind of layer to making it difficult to assess.

But I think the point that I always come back to is like, if we are taking progress photos, it doesn’t have to be super often. It can be monthly, it can be even like bimonthly just having those progress photos every now and then. If you can see visually that you’ve lost body fat in certain areas and that you are kind of toning or shaping up, you know, you’re gaining muscle, you’re losing body fat.

That is the outcome that most people are after. They want to feel good, they want to look a little bit better and maybe they want to improve their health. And if we see that you’re visually getting leaner, we know your body fat percentage is going down and we don’t necessarily need to have a specific number that we’re shooting for. And I think sometimes that can be hard for people to grasp.

But I’m like, there are other data metrics that we can focus on that are more numbers based. Like we can use scale weight, we can use tape measures, we can use gym performance. That’s a massive one that I have people focus on. If you know the number on the scale is slowly going down and the numbers in the gym are going up, very good sign, very good sign that we’re getting the outcomes that we’d like.

So that’s kind of my thoughts on body fat assessment tools and then the kind of the coaches eye and where that comes into to body fat. So I’d love to hear kind of your personal experience with that and how you view somebody who comes to you like asking about body fat and they’re curious or they maybe they want to get some of these tests done.

Giacomo:

I still like thinking about body fat on a personal level. Even being 30 years in the game, I still tend to put a number on it from time to time. Just out of curiosity, like, where am I at now? So I get it. I understand the need to quantify things to feel motivated, proud or just to know where you’re at. The two things I latched onto, well, one, to answer your question from earlier, because I haven’t actually answered it yet, but I’ve been thinking about it, it’s that in general, people are

starting to assess their body fat more accurately, which is pretty cool. But on the whole, the vast majority still underestimate how much body fat they have. And I think I blame the measurements themselves, right, because people want to be in a certain place, but people are just typically optimistic and positive is what I’ve come to see.

When it comes to where they want to be goal wise and where they think they are, as far as how far away they are from their goal. I don’t know where people are coming from in general, whether it’s a testing, whether it’s where they feel they want to be. But that’s what I have seen across the board over the years and all my years of coaching that people are either severely underestimating how much body fat they have or they’re closer to being accurate.

And more people are accurate these days than not. I think people are having a much more realistic view of it. But the other thing is a lot of people that come to you for coaching have already done a lot of the work, work on their own, right? So if they’ve seen their body, they know their body fat and how it’s distributed from head to toe, they know where they hold it more, they’ve probably started to assess. And so that makes me happy. But every once in a while you’ll have outlandish

comments and you don’t know if someone’s literally saying this, my body fat is, or they’re just being silly, but like I’m at 0% or I’m at 6%, I’m like, no, you’re not. I’m at 15%. No, you’re not. You’re not even close to those numbers. So I don’t know. But then the other thing I latched onto was because this I’m genuinely curious about. You mentioned the water. As far as all the layers that the DEXA scans with, what is it? Radiation? The X ray.

Ben:

Dual X ray, yeah.

Giacomo:

So you get a dual X ray that goes into the body and it scans all these layers of flesh, meat, bone, whatever. What is it about when it scans the water that is different, that can throw all the rest of the measurements off?

Ben:

I think it’s just when you’re leaner, the percentage of your, like the percentage of your tissues that are more subject to fluctuations in water weight are higher proportionally because you have more muscle mass and muscle is, you know, because of glycogen can. It can be more, more hydrated, less hydrated, whereas fat tissue is relatively Stable in terms of its water content. Like, it’s not. The fat cells aren’t getting constantly depleted or replated with water.

So because you’re going to have a higher percentage of your body made up of skeletal muscle and lean muscle or just lean tissue, you’re going to get more of that water weight fluctuation when you’re leaner versus heavier. Which is why I think you get a little bit more of that skewing of the data when you get the really lean individuals from test to test. My understanding. Yes.

Giacomo:

Okay, got it.

Ben:

So there might be a wider, wider range of. Yeah. Test results that you could get. Whereas when you’re higher body fat percentage, maybe it’s a little bit narrower. That’s. That’s my understanding. Again, I’m not an expert on. An expert on this. It’s been a while since I’ve done the test myself. Um, yeah, I thought you brought up some, some really interesting points.

I, I almost feel like the. I agree, actually that I feel like people are better at assessing it than when I first started coaching. I noticed that I would get kind of. I would be like, yeah, we’re going to need to add 10% to that.

Giacomo:

People don’t like to hear that.

Ben:

Yeah, they get upset.

Giacomo:

They take it personally.

Ben:

Yeah. Also, a lot of people still don’t understand that men and women have inherently different, like, body fat percentages. And so that’s a conversation. Like, I still. Some people hear some people saying, like, oh, yeah, like this person, like, so. And so she stepped on stage at like 5% body fat. And I’m like, she would be dead. She would be dead if she was 5% body fat.

Like, that’s just. This is not something that can happen. And I feel like the place that I see it now, most with people who are underestimating their body fat percentage is actually competitive bodybuilders because it’s the classic thing to be like, oh, I’m gonna be like 170 on stage. And they’re like 190 or 200 right now. And you’re like, try knocking 20 pounds off that.

You’re gonna be like 150 on stage. And people don’t want to hear that because they have this complex about the number and like being like, I’m gonna look small, I’m gonna look stringy. I’m gonna look whatever it is. And it’s just the reality that you have to get to whatever weight you need to get to in order to display a certain number of. Certain level of conditioning that’s Competitive for whatever category you want to be in.

And the number on the scale doesn’t matter. The judges, you don’t have something on your forehead that says how much you weigh when you step on stage. They’re not looking at that. So I’ve seen people who look like they weigh 200 pounds and they weigh 140. It’s. It’s crazy. Just. Just the density that can come across as you get leaner. And we’ve all experienced this, right?

You’re in the gym, somebody’s like, oh, you look like you’ve gotten really. You’ve gotten a lot bigger recently. And you’re like, actually, I’m 20 pounds lighter than the last time you saw me, but I just have definition. So it’s the illusion that you look. That you look bigger. So, yeah, it’s interesting how body fat can also play this role in, you know, the way that we appear and making us, like, look a certain way, like, look like you look bigger in clothes, most likely.

Which is why I. One of the reasons why I like being a little bit, you know, heavier, walking around a little bit heavier is because I just like the way clothes fit a little bit more, whereas, like, things hang off me when I’m a little bit leaner. So, yeah, body fat, you know, it. I guess we could kind of segue this into a conversation about what’s its role, how can it provide function?

And then obviously there’s a trade off where having too much body fat, too much adiposity, we know it’s kind of a no dumb thing that we know that that leads to a variety of health consequences if that’s kind of maintained. So in terms of being facilitative, like hormones, hunger hormones, that’s something that’s very body fat dependent because our body fat cells actually produce a hunger hormone called leptin.

So leptin kind of shuts off our hunger signaling, whereas ghrelin. I always like to think of this as ghrelin. Like, grr. Like your stomach rumbling a little bit more. And so the more body fat we have, the more leptin we produce. And so that’s kind of a way that it’s facilitative, like, why you can’t really stay shredded year round. There’s a lot that goes into that.

But, uh, I think just the more that I see it with clients, like, the more that you can view body fat as, like, this neutral thing where it’s like, it has its. It has its pros and it has its cons, and just like, finding Whatever that sweet spot is for you. Depending on your goals and where you are at right now, um, it’s not bad to be a higher body fat percentage.

As long as you’re still kind of in whatever you define to be healthy for yourself. Getting blood work obviously can help with, with that. And yeah, being leaner can be cool too. You might see some improvements, you’ll probably see some improvements in your health and your blood work, your physical health. But again, just because you see those doesn’t mean that there aren’t other areas that are important too, like, you know, social.

And often food and social events are kind of tied into each other and having flexibility with that. So I just think there’s a lot more to it. Like people think body fat percentage high, bad, body fat percentage low, good. And it’s not that simple. Like there’s, there’s, there’s a range for everyone, depending on your goal, depending on the person, depending on, you know, there’s, there’s just so many factors there, which is why having a coach in your

corner is helpful because you can talk it out with them and they can help you figure out whatever the best path forward is for you. Based on what are your goals, where are you at?

Giacomo:

Yeah, at some point you have to assess how you’re performing and how you’re recovering and cross a line. If the amount of body fat that you have on you is not serving your needs or your goal at that point in time, mass moves mass. So having more body fat on you will help you, I would think, have less strain on your connective tissue will help your leverages so that you can build more muscle and you use your muscle better.

You can burn through your body fat energy stores. Once your like, as your glycogen stores are being dependent, depleted, you can also, I would imagine, tap into your body fat energy stores and when there’s more of them, your body’s more likely to use them to perform and recover. Right. If there’s less of them, fatigue aside, and how you feel, you’re just gonna have a harder time pushing.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can rely on adrenaline and your motivation and the fact that you’re conditioned to be that way, but you’re still working from a net deficit compared to a person who has more body fat on them that’s able to have better, better leverages and that’s able to obviously feel better and access their body fat to perform and recover.

So there’s definitely an advantage to having more body fat in that regard. Of course, yeah, you can have so much body fat on you that I would imagine that you’re perhaps a little more slower moving and depending on your goal, that could be a good thing. That could also be a bad thing. So there’s a lot of things to consider for sure. The one thing that I thought was interesting when I had gotten a DEXA scan is when I saw my visceral fat go up, even though my body fat was going down.

And it was because of stress, because I was getting unreasonably lean really fast. So that’s an interesting data set point that you can in fact take from a scan if it’s totally accurate. But there are other different outlying things that you can. Well, then the other thing you could think about is for someone to just measure, measure their, like get an estimate of their overall bone density for health.

Right. To prevent, to see if they’re starting to toe the line for osteopenia or osteoporosis, for example. And this is where it has far less to do with how accurate it is and, and more to do with like, well, can we get a general sense of how much muscle mass this person has on their frame and what their bone density is without trying to figure out how exactly exact it is? Right.

Ben:

No, that’s a good point too. I think when we think about body fat percentage assessment tools, we don’t necessarily think about the other data that we can get from that, like the bone mineral density and what the implications mean, muscle mass. Maybe in certain areas where you could look to pack on a little bit more. Because if you do have a lot of body fat percentage, you know, blood, body fat covering it up, sometimes it can be hard to tell how much muscle do I have in this kind of

certain area? You might not know. And so getting leaner can help with that. But maybe you get a skin you’re able to see like, oh, I’d like to build a little bit muscle, more muscle here or there, or I need to, you know, maybe have, do some more weight bearing activity here or there for the, for the bone mineral density side of things. So yeah, I think that they are a tool. Like lots of things, they can be used positively, they can also be used negatively if you put too much stock into them

and you’re just not coming at it with the right frame of mind. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of different kind of topics and offshoots from the idea of measuring body fat and how to assess that. Was there anything else that you feel like we didn’t Touch on that. We could have dove into a little bit more. Deeper.

Giacomo:

We didn’t even touch on all the different body fat tests.

Ben:

Yeah, so Dexa is the kind of. The one that we’ve been talking about a lot of. There’s bod pod, which is basically like you sit in this chamber. It kind of looks like a little like spaceship, like an egg. And you sit in there and I believe it has to do with like your breath breathing in and out. And somehow it’s able to assess that. I used a tool when I was in school that was kind of a similar idea. But they almost. I think they just put basically like they put our heads in a dome and we wore this

like kind of mouth thing. So it wasn’t our entire body, but it’s the calculations based on like the. The volume and how the air changes with. Again, it’s been a while since I did this, so I don’t exactly remember. There’s underwater weighing. That was like one of the hydrostatic. Yeah, hydrostatic. That was like one of the original. More freaks people out because you have.

Giacomo:

To breathe out as much. As much air as possible. And if you get anxiety about breathing out all of your air and then being underwater, that could freak you out a little bit.

Ben:

Yeah. There’s the calipers, which is like the little pinchy things with the skin, which is, you know, again, with the right.

Giacomo:

Error dependent, as opposed to like the other one where it’s like, how much air can you breathe out? That’s also not usually error dependent, but patient. Is that the right word? Error dependent? Can you screw up the BOD pod on your own?

Ben:

I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a BOD pod just like in a commercial gym for someone to use. It’s more of a research tool from what I understand. But the in body, now that’s one that is in a lot of gyms. And like they have now these in body scales. That’s another good conversation. The body fat scales really push on these days. So it’s like the electrical.

So BIA is another very common one which stands for bio. Like bio. It’s bioelectrical impedance, which basically it sends these shocks through your body. And based on, like, how they are, you know, affected and how they have to move and like the speed at which that happens, it can give you an assessment of how much of your body is body fat versus not.

Giacomo:

Okay, so how much. Where the electric current is coming from and how far it can travel matters. So Some of them are from the feet, some of them from the hands. And then the whole thing is like, well, we’ll do one from the feet and from the hands. But it’s. But yeah, those have a pretty high degree of error.

Ben:

Very high degree of error. Exactly. I don’t remember the precise numbers, but they have a lot of these in commercial gyms. They have these scales now where it’s just like, it has these little electrodes and you step onto it and tells you your weight and your body fat percentage. And I can tell you, I’ve used these. I’ve used the scale that has this feature when I was like, stage lean, ready to get on stage, and it was like 15% body fat.

Giacomo:

How did you feel? Did it mess with you a little bit?

Ben:

No, I just laughed. I just laughed because I was like, okay, this is just like clear evidence. Yeah, it’s comically. It’s comically inaccurate. So it’s like, if it’s telling me this now, then, like, when I’m a higher body fat percentage, why. Why am I really playing too much into it? So I think it’s kind of a thing that gyms will use to kind of.

Because it’s like, ooh, it’s fun to know what’s my body fat percentage. It’s a curiosity thing, like you said, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think gyms will kind of use that often as like, oh, we have a. We have an in body as a way to, you know, sell personal training because we’ll be able to get it down. It’s like, yeah, you might be able to make enough change with somebody that even with the degrees of error, the margin of error, you’re still going to see a drop there.

And it’s going to get that person excited about seeing their in body, like, go down every single week again. If it gets somebody excited and it gets them to adhere to their program and the routine, great. It’s a positive. It’s just when you start to take it for what it’s not that it becomes more of like a conversation.

Giacomo:

Exactly. There was the other thought that slipped. Oh, here we go. One other final thought, and I’m curious to know if you have any, because I do feel like we’ve pretty much covered everything. Would you change how the test categorizes body fat percentages as far as labeling them? This is athletic, blah, blah, blah.

Ben:

Ooh, that’s a good question. You know, I think when most people see the way that it labels it, they understand why the Naming is the way that it is. I don’t remember exactly what. It’s what the ranges are, you know, are they going to be accurate for every single person? No, it’s kind of like the BMI thing. It’s like we have these ranges for bmi. Is everyone who’s in this certain BMI going to be healthy or overweight or obese?

Because you’re going to get bodybuilders who are like technically obese according to BMI and they’re, you know, walking around 10 to 15% body fat, objectively healthy, blood work wise. And then you’re going to get, you know. Yeah, you’re, you’re not always, they’re not always going to be reflective. But like on a population level, is it a, you know, broad heuristic that can get across the point that it’s trying to get across?

Maybe, possibly. So I wouldn’t say it’s like the worst thing in the world, but again, like the whole idea that there’s a certain body fat percentage that is athletic, it’s like for what, for yourself, sport. What’s your sport that. That can have a, you know, a large impact on that. It’s just like the term athletic is kind of like the term healthy. It just needs more definition, it needs more specificity in my mind. So I think we can say that in general there are certain body fat

percentages and ranges that are probably more conducive to athletic performance on the whole, given that most athletic performance is a combination of endurance, endurance, strength, speed, stamina, etc. And so we can probably say that lower body fat percentages are more conducive to that, not on the extremes. So yeah, that’s about sums up my thoughts on those sort of classifications. Did you have any specific points that you wanted to kind of like nail home about that?

Giacomo:

I don’t think so. I think that’s a different conversation for a different day. But you have my wheel spinning on that one for sure.

Ben:

Okay. This has been another episode of Vegan Proteins Mussels by Russell’s Radio. If you feel like you could benefit from the assessment, the careful eye of one of our coaches, as we talked about today and mentioned how crucial that can be sometimes is having somebody who can help you figure out. I have all this data, I have all this information. How do I put it to use practically, head over to veganproteins.com hit the contact button.

Coach will get back to you within 24 hours. We’re here to support you. However, if you need on your vegan health and fitness journey. You can follow Jonathan on Instagram Muscles by Brussels at Vegan Proteins as well over on Instagram at Benamitchell if you want to follow along.

Giacomo:

For myself, thanks so much for tuning in to another episode and we’ll talk to you soon.

Ben:

Bye guys.