I don’t have a scale handy that is capable of giving my weight, but I’m skeptical about whether that number is meaningful anyway.
What is meaningful is the amount of belt I could be using. It looks like about 6 inches (a little more than 15 cm) of loss on my waist in the past year or so.
MAS, has a post about his skepticism of Body Mass Index. Hugh Jackman and Mike Tyson at his peak would measure as “Obese” according to the BMI, basically. In that post he cites The Frankie Method for measuring leanness. Frankie was a trainer at a former gym of MAS, and his measure was: “Can you see your abs? If no, then you are too fat.” My answer to that is still no, but I can see the outlines of where they will be.
I made a diagram:
five comments so far...
Love the flowchart. I am working on a post that describes a metric that provides more guidance than the Frankie method and gets around the problems of using BMI.
I updated the flowchart, since leanness does not automatically imply “healthy” – people in a famine, anorexics, and the sick may have abs to show, but health is not the thing, it’s simply, “not fat.”
I’ll be looking forward to your post MAS!
[…] Measure (or Belt) – A shrinking waist size is half the goal. Measuring fat loss with a belt or tape measure is superior to the scale. A tape measure does not penalize muscle […]
The Frankie method is ridiculous, but true.
Joe I agree totally, you can’t be healthy when you are obese, but if you are lean, that does not mean you are healthy.
[…] waist size is half the goal. Measuring fat loss with a belt or tape measure is superior to the scale. A tape measure does not penalize muscle […]