Carbs and Fat

[ny biker]

I have no idea how to answer your questions. But, two thoughts.

- I was recently discussing body fat measurements with my trainer, including the inaccuracies of all the available methods of measurement, and he told me that bod pods can measure very lean athletes as having negative body fat, which is really possible. And I've read that pod bod measurements can be affected by the amount of gas in your digestive tract. Bottom line being that a bod pod measurement might be more accurate than other methods, but it is still an approximation. So it could be that either (or both) or your measurements were a bit off.

- You say you have decreased weight training but are still exercising a lot. What kind of exercise have you substituted for the weight training? It could be that whatever you are doing now is burning more calories and building less muscle mass than your former routine, and either or both of those things is affecting your weight and body composition.

[goldfinch]

Thank you for your comments Goldfinch. It is uncertain how the bod pod treats water in the body, it could be that part of the decreased lean mass is no more than my retaining less water yesterday morning than the day I had the first test...

I have no idea how to answer your questions. But, two thoughts.

- I was recently discussing body fat measurements with my trainer, including the inaccuracies of all the available methods of measurement, and he told me that bod pods can measure very lean athletes as having negative body fat, which is really possible. And I've read that pod bod measurements can be affected by the amount of gas in your digestive tract. Bottom line being that a bod pod measurement might be more accurate than other methods, but it is still an approximation. So it could be that either (or both) or your measurements were a bit off.

I've been interested in the BodPod but it does look like there can be a fairly high error rate on an individual basis, even though on a population basis it is pretty accurate: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=175

[Catrin]

I've been interested in the BodPod but it does look like there can be a fairly high error rate on an individual basis, even though on a population basis it is pretty accurate: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=175

I don't think there can be a perfect tool, but this is more accurate than the skin-fold test. Thankfully I am not paying for any of these tests - they are/were part of the $15 ten-week class I took at my fitness facility. Awesome deal. The fun part is learning how to process/use the results in a manner that is helpful.

[Catrin]

I have no idea how to answer your questions. But, two thoughts.....

- You say you have decreased weight training but are still exercising a lot. What kind of exercise have you substituted for the weight training? It could be that whatever you are doing now is burning more calories and building less muscle mass than your former routine, and either or both of those things is affecting your weight and body composition.

I don't think there is a real answer to this - just trying to wrap my brain around it and decide what changes, if any, that I want to make. It really, really helps to talk it out and, as a single person with not many fitness minded friends outside of this forum, I really appreciate the depth of experience found here.

The metabolic training we've been doing focuses on engaging as many large muscle groups as possible for every exercise - and there have been quite a lot of weights involved. So it isn't like I've been backing off on strength - just not doing my traditional strength workout more than once a week as the less traditional training took up two of my usual training days and of course I need to recover properly. I think it would help to illustrate:

This means that instead of, say, 3 sets per arm of 12 dumbell swings using a 25 pound weight - instead I had a 20 pound kettlebell and hit the 200k track:
5 kettlebell swings (one per step), then 5 burpees.
5 more kettlebell swings, 5 burpees - repeat for one complete track circuit. This took some time and not all of us were able to complete - but I did I was the last one to complete before he called time and we moved to something else

Fill the rest of the hour with equally intense and varied combinations and you can see why I couldn't do my usual workout more than once a week. The ending two exercises at the last class was 2 minutes of standing shoulder presses with a 25 pound plate (41 shoulder presses for me) followed by 2 minutes of jumping jacks (for me that was 125, I am slow at jumping jacks). Our trainer was very strict about proper form.

So with that kind of activity, I don't think that I would have lost any real strength - and indeed I feel like I have far more upper body strength than when we started. No way could I have done 41 shoulder presses with a 25 pound plate in 2 minutes (or one hour) prior to this class.

That leads back to your first thought - how accurate either reading was. Nothing is perfect, and that could well be involved. I will do it again this summer - I've one more free session this year.