Reality of knowing what's so....

So, I saw my trainer last week and he measured my body fat with two different measurement methods. First I stood on a special scale that allowed him to collect all sorts of data including my weight, body fat percentage and body mass index. Then he used calipers and measured my body fat under my arm, above the hip and on my thigh (that was fun!). He stated that neither method is 100% accurate however with information from both of them, we can get a pretty good idea of where I’m at in regard to excess body fat.

I have to say, I’ve never measured my body fat, never paid attention to how it’s done and had no idea whether my measurements were good or bad. After weighing and measuring me Carsten went to a website to plug the numbers into a formula and check out my body mass index (BMI). He said it was 35.5 on the scale and 32 with the calipers. Neither sounded horrible to me, but I was clueless. Ideally a womans BMI should be in the 20’s and a mans slightly lower than that.

EEEEEEEKKKK! To my dismay, I have much work to do. I mean, I knew that, but I guess because I can hold a lot of weight and not look like it, I was hoping my BMI wasn’t so awful. I can see that I was looking for a way to ‘look good’ with a low BMI rather than simply look to see what’s so with my BMI and move forward from there. It’s so amazing how quickly my mind goes to trying to ‘look good’ even when the reason I even went to a physical trainer in the first place was to get healthy, be fit and stop trying to hide behind styles of clothing that ‘cover up’ what is there that I don’t want to be there (like excess fat and rolls).