"What is my ideal weight?"
Often, our clients are looking for this answer at their first appointment.
Generally speaking, this can be calculated from the relationship between height and weight. However, in practice, there are other factors that are also important indicator of health, such as your % body fat, and how this is distributed in your body.
As you can see in the picture "one pound of fat" is much less dense than "one pound of muscle", therefore occupy more space in your body.
Most people that initiate weight-bearing exercise together with an adequate diet can notice reduction of measurements, before seeing great results in the scale. This can be off putting for many who are looking to see the weight dropping at fast speed.
For general population, and when is not possible to have an individual assessment, BMI - ratio to weight in relation to height is often used. The ideal weight could be established for BMI between 21-22. However, this is very limited, especially for those who take regular physical activities.
For a better assessment, we recommend to use a method to estimate your body composition such as bio-impedance, DEXA and skin folds. We particularly assess our clients with bio-impedance, as it also give as an estimation of muscle mass, body water, bone mass, and metabolic age, all together help us to monitor our clients progress and design a bespoke dietary plan.
Besides the weight, % of body fat and muscle mass, another important measurement is the waist circumference. The measurement of waist circumference provides information regarding fat topography – where body fat is stored. This is important because people who carry their weight centrally are particularly at risk of developing heart disease and type-2 diabetes. Visceral fat in particular appears to be associated with insulin resistance, which leads to type-2 diabetes. Determining an individual's waist circumference measurement helps to target treatment towards particularly at-risk patients who have a tendency to store their excess weight centrally.
At the Clinic we start our consultations taking all those measurements as the first step to assess our client health, before we move to the Nutritional Assessment, which is equally important to evaluate each client’s requirement and to enable us to design a bespoke dietary plan and fitness regime.
