Weight Loss versus Fat Loss
People feel better about themselves when they are not carrying excess weight, but if you think about it it’s not really the weight, it’s the fat that they’re concerned about.
The best way to determine if someone’s overweight is to simply look at him or her without all his or her clothes on. A fat person looks fat. You don't need complex measuring devices to tell you if someone is fat. It's plain to see. And because it is so plain to see, no one wants to appear fat.
I’ll give you an example. Take two men who both weigh 225 pounds and are say six feet tall. If we use their BMI measurements as an indicator (the BMI uses only the weight and height in consideration when determining if someone is overweight), they’re identical as far as their BMI. But if you’re somewhere in the real world and just look at these two people, it’s a different story.
Side by side, Matt, who works out with weights and is pretty muscular and strong, looks lean and mean and has a body fat level of around 10%. This means that he’s carrying less than 25 pounds of fat on his frame.
No way anyone would ever call Matt fat because he isn’t. And even if he was, you’d be dumb to call him fat cause he’d knock your block off.
Now Jim, on the other hand, is a master of the remote control, and along with his well-worn couch and extravagant multimedia theatre, only exercises one part of his anatomy, his right forearm - needed of course to work all those remote controls.
His body fat level measures out at 30%, which means he’s carrying almost 70 pounds of bodyfat on his frame. Jim is definitely fat, and if you called him fat he’d just turn up the volume.
So while the BMI stats for Matt and Jim are the same, seeing them side-by-side gives you the real picture. Matt’s lean and Jim is fat.
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