By Dr. Colin Michie of AUC Medical School
Dr. Colin Michie has worked as a paediatrician in the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. He is specialised in nutrition, haematology and infectious diseases. Now the Associate Academic Dean for the American University of the Caribbean Medical School in St. Maarten, his enthusiasm is training medical students and healthcare teams to ensure they deliver better value health care.
Healthy women biologically have lower proportions of muscle (approximately 30%) and higher proportions of fat (18-30%) than men, who have some 40% of muscle and 10-25% fat. This variation is evident from early adolescence; the nursery rhyme about little girls being made of “sugar and spice” while little boys are manufactured from “slugs, snails and puppy-dog tails” has some basis in fact.
As we grow older, fatness usually increases. After 60 years of age, bone mass tends to decrease. Fat is normally present in our skin, but if it accumulates, it tends to collect in the abdomen (visceral fat) causing us to become apple-shaped. Health risks from being apple-shaped or having a large neck are great. By contrast, accumulation of fat around the buttocks and thighs (causing a pear-shaped body) is less likely to give rise to health complications. Lucille Clifton wrote a poem in homage to her hips:
They don’t fit into little pretty places.
These hips are free hips.
They don’t like to be held back.
These hips have never been enslaved.
They go where they want to go.
They do what they want to do.
These hips are mighty hips.
The good news is that there are several practical measurements we can collect at home to estimate approximately how much fat we carry. A measure of your height and weight can be put on a graph (from the Centers of Disease Control) to find out if you are overweight (see below).
Your weight can be combined with a measure of your waist and your neck circumference to estimate your percentage of body fat. Great guides as to how to do this can be found online at: www.calculator.net/army-body-fat-calculator.html or at www.calculator.pro/Body_Mass_Index.html.
In drawing or painting classes or in the clinic, your neck circumference (measured just under your voice box) should be just less than double your waistline. This is why you can estimate if trousers will fit you by testing them around your neck. A similar method that comes without any figures is the string test. If you cut a piece of string to your height, then fold it in half, the folded string should go around your waist. If it does not, you have too much visceral fat.
These methods are simple short-cuts; they are used by medical staff and are safe to use at home. Athletes may find these measures unhelpful because in training, one can increase muscle mass in the back and neck. Sophisticated systems of estimating body water or fat include magnetic resonance imaging, Dexa scans or impedance. Skinfold thickness as measured with calipers can assist too. However, these are not required for most of us. Weight, waistline and neckline measured every few months will tell us all a great deal about our health and body beauty. Our perceptions of these without measurements are not always accurate or useful.
Will you measure up and find out what you are made of?
