In today’s world of high-tech wizardry, losing weight or staying fit goes way beyond the numbers on a scale. OMG. Get the calculator out. (Too old school? Sorry.)
Except for the dieting and discipline needed to achieve it, losing weight sounds simple. If you want to get from 193 pounds to 175 pounds by May 1, that means losing 18 pounds in four months. But that alone won’t necessarily make you fitter and healthier, and here’s where the extra numbers come into play.
I recently spent 45 seconds of my life on an InBody 570 composition analyzer that kicked out numbers for me on everything from intracellular water and dry lean mass to percentage of body fat and skeletal muscle mass. Surprisingly, the figures weren’t that bad. Or so I was told, seeing that I’d never heard of half the data before.
“It’s pretty good, really,” said Stephanie Ellingwood, co-founder of My Body Stats in Artesia, which has an InBody 570 in the office that also gets taken to gyms and businesses. “You must exercise, so that’s good. I want to make sure I’m helping people, and this is the perfect way to do that. Getting people to be more aware of their bodies and understanding what is really healthy, in addition to showing that weight is just a number, is so important.”
In other words, a person can be skinny and unhealthy or 5 feet 11 and 230 pounds and be a physical specimen (see: running backs, NFL).
For me, a fiftysomething guy who has always been active but fallen into the trap of eating a lot of processed food, the numbers show that I’m 6-5 and 226.6 pounds with 16 percent body fat. One of the more interesting things is the breakdown of skeletal muscle mass and body fat mass as it stacks up to total weight. Of my 226.6 pounds, 104.8 pounds are skeletal muscle mass and 43 are body fat mass, leaving 78.8 pounds of my weight coming from muscle, fat, water and minerals, which includes the bones.
The InBody machine also breaks down pounds and percentage of body weight in each arm, leg and the trunk, in addition to showing basal metabolic rate and visceral fat level. Confusing? It can be, but for people interested in body composition and what actually is healthy, it’s kind of cool. Numerous sports teams use them, as do large corporations. Ellingwood and her business partner, Jully Peng, are rare in that they see individuals in their office or groups at gyms and training facilities.
“We’re seeing a lot of people who are just starting to work out, since it’s the beginning of the year,” Ellingwood said in mid January. “We’re also having some personal trainers check it out. I would love to have us somehow integrated into as many gyms and businesses as we can.”
Ellingwood, a former golf instructor who played mini-tour events, says people who play a lot of golf or tennis might be surprised to know about the discrepancies between each side of the body.
“The biggest thing with golf is being one-side dominant, which leads to imbalance,” she said. “When you’re more well-balanced you can increase your speed and increase your power and still have the stopping power to not throw your back out.”
During her travels, Ellingwood has also noticed that things aren’t very balanced when it comes to body shapes here and abroad. It’s one of the reasons she wanted to get involved somehow in the health and fitness industry.
“There are so many obese people in the U.S.,” she said. “There needs to be a big change. I’m really hoping for a way to make people more aware that it’s unhealthy to continue on the path we’re on.”
