Every morning, I weigh myself with an electronic scale (Taylor, model 5568) that takes into account my age, gender and height.  It calculates my weight, my % Muscle, % Fat, BMI, and number of calories needed to maintain my current body weight.  Basically it, reads this information using bioelectric impedance analysis (for more information go here).  I keep track of this information every day and I use it to determine how my body changes over time as a result of my diet or exercise habits.  This allows me to spot problem areas, and to see how intensely (or not) my body responds to specific stimuli. I have posted my data for all to see, and I will update the information frequently so everyone will be able to track my progress over time.  The longer I do this, the more informative it is.

For a blank template, see below:

Body Composition Tracker 2012 Template

Week 1 Results

Here are my numbers:

I am quite pleased to see that my body weight decreased by 9.4 pounds!  Although in many sources it says that the first week is just water weight,  I beg to differ.  My % water remained fairly constant during the week- it even increased during the course of the week as I lost more weight.  According to my math (which is as accurate as I can make it, given my tools), I have a decrease of 7.7 pounds of fat and 1.1 pounds of muscle.  Although it seems to be a bad thing, losing a little muscle is a normal process of losing weight on a reduction diet.  As long as my fat loss outstrips my muscle loss I should be fine.  Besides, once off my reduction diet I plan on adopting a weight training regimen to bring my % muscle up again (while still watching the carbs, so I don’t gain back any weight).

Below is a graph of my progress this week:

I like to dwell on the fact that at the beginning of the week I had more fat than I did muscle, and over the week I was able to reverse this.  I also enjoy looking at the results of my body measurements, since I got smaller everywhere:

More on this info next week!