There is only so much you can conclude from your body weight figures. While the body weight, for instance, as seen against your height in body mass index can give us some sort of a picture of your state of health as far as body weight is concerned, the information that we get in this way is far from complete. The body weight does not, for one, reveal what the components that make it up are – and these could be more important than anything else in determining your state of health. It could, for instance, be true that you weigh so much, alright, but if your high weight is composed largely of muscle tissue rather than fat, then you are better off than another person of a similar weight and even height, but whose weight is composed more of fat than muscle tissue. Obviously, there is a need for a way going deeper and working out what the specific components of body weight are – so that we can make more informed decision based on it.
Enter the body fat monitors.
Body fat monitors are bioelectrical devices that conveniently work out the percentage of your body weight that is fat – which is a very useful revelation, because in fighting excessive body weight, the thing you need to target is this excessive fat – rather than the other components of body weight like muscle tissue which truly serve a useful purpose. If you have been in a certain diet or exercise weight-reduction effort, and have indeed lost weight, but the body fat monitor shows that your fat percentage has remained constant, then it might be that your weight loss effort has not been entirely successful. In a similar manner, if you have been in a weight loss effort where you have not lost very much in terms of overall body weight, but have lost significantly in terms of body fat percentage, then chances are that you are being successful with your weight loss effort (in spite of the relatively low overall weight loss achievement) because it is body fat that is generally targeted in weight loss efforts.
And contrary to what you might fear, the use of body fat monitors is not intrusive. All you have to do to get a body fat monitor reading could be as simple as taking some three pinches at your skin (it is not painful – just an ordinary pinch like what you would make on your skin to look keenly at a mysterious pimple) or just stand on a body fat monitors that works like any bathroom scale.
The body fat monitors that require you to take three pinches at three different locations on the body work through electronic calipers which take the fat components at the three points where you take the pinches as samples, and from them work out a reasonably accurate body fat percentage figure. The body fat monitors that you stand on as a bathroom scale, on the other hand use a method called bioelectrical impedance analysis to work out the percentage of fat in your body and this can give highly accurate and consistent results. Bioelectrical impedance is obviously slightly more intrusive than the use of electronic calipers but the former (bioelectrical impedance) tends to be largely safe and anyone, expect a person using a pacemaker, can use it, with added advantage of consistency it comes with, at least as compared to electronic clippers which work through sampling.