Gender, Body Fat, and Health

While most people want to maintain a relatively lean body mass in order to look aesthetically pleasing, there are far more important reasons related to overall health to maintain relatively low body fat levels.

The first thing people need to keep in mind is that women are genetically pre-dispositioned to have higher body fat levels.

They will never be able to be as lean as males and stay healthy, just do the basic fact that they require higher body levels in order to be able to produce a baby if necessary. If women try to drop too low with their body fat levels, they most commonly will experience problems with menstruation as their body is trying hard to prevent them from being able to give birth to that baby.

Females will stay healthiest if they stay within the 20-25% body fat range, while males should aim for a healthy range of 10-15%.

When it comes to being classified as ‘overweight', the levels associated with this are 20% for men and 30% for women.

Taking your body fat levels and comparing it to this guideline is going to be a much better method for assessing whether or not you are truly overweight. When people just use the scale weight as a guideline for degrees of being overweight, they are not taking into account muscle mass.

Those individuals - particularly males, who are on the very muscular side will almost always come up as ‘overweight' when they go by their scale weight. Many of these people are anything but overweight though, as many will have body fat levels well within the healthy range.

Now, when speaking in terms of overall health however, it's important to look at the distribution of the body fat as this is what most commonly will determine how great of a health risk is present.

People who carry the vast majority of their body fat in the abdominal area, which is referred to as being ‘android' will be definitely be at an increased risk over someone who has the body fat more evenly distributed throughout the body.

Most commonly you do see this type of fat distribution pattern among males, while females more typically show a gynoid or pear body type. This will be more characterized by having the body fat located in the hip and thigh region.

While it is not entirely certain exactly why there is such a different typical distribution pattern of body fat on the body, what studies have been done suggest that it's largely related to the different hormones in the body along with different hormone receptors and enzyme concentrations.

In order to determine your own health risk when it comes to waist circumference, the two methods that are commonly used are waist-to-hip ratios and waist circumference.

The waist-to-hip ratio is basically the circumference of the waist, divided by the total circumference of the hips.

This can easily be taken and you can measure it in inches or centimeters. When doing it, you will want the measuring tape to be horizontal all the way around the body to ensure accuracy, and the measurement should be taken around the smallest part of the waist and the largest part of the hips.

Typically a ratio that is above 0.94 for males and 0.82 for females will be categorized as being in the high risk group and further dietary and exercise action should be taken in order to improve this ratio.

When just using a simple waist circumference measurement, a healthy waist circumference is considered to be under 102 cm (40 inches) for men and 88 cm (34 inches) for women.

So, next time you're evaluating your progress with your workouts, keep this in mind. You definitely should aim to maintain body health levels for reasons beyond simply wanting to look the best you can.