What is Body Composition?

Your weight on the scales is a mixture of fat and lean tissue. Lean tissue is composed of muscles, organs, bones, and water. But, it is primarily the muscle and organ portions of the lean mass that change with diet and exercise.

When you lose weight, you can preserve the muscle component of the lean by altering your diet and exercise strategy: following a healthy eating plan and by following an exercise regimen that contains a significant amount of progressive resistance exercises.

It’s not just weight loss on the scales that you want to achieve, but a loss of fat, while minimising the loss of muscle. You cannot follow these changes by using the scale alone as your primary assessment tool . If you have access to a fitness professional (link to locator) who can accurately monitor your progress, this form of measurement is your best tool.

For the majority of us, we can still gain a pretty accurate estimation of our physical condition, basal metabolic rate, energy burned in daily activity and guide as to overall food requirements by simply following the ‘body calculator’ guidelines.