Why 5th Grade Math is Important For Fat Loss

I would have never known what really counts for weight loss if I hadn’t paid so much attention to my fifth grade math teacher. While most people apply the math they learned in second grade to fat loss, they’re about 3 grades behind in understanding what fat loss is really all about.

The General Practices

Most people look at their weight alone. If you weigh 150 pounds and you go down to 135, then you’ve lost 15 pounds of your weight and you’re doing awesome.

This is a good rule of thumb and weighing yourself is important. However, this is second grade math while you need to apply fifth grade to really determine how well your fat loss process is going.

Fifth Grade Math

The real way to determine how well you’re doing is to calculate percentages, not pounds. I’m talking about your body’s fat loss percentage, the real way to see how lean you are.

When you lose weight you want to make sure you’re losing the right kind of weight: you need to make sure you’re shedding fat, first and foremost, and not too much muscle tissue as well.

After all, you can have very little fat on your but if you’re also short on muscle you will still look weak and flabby.

The key is to lower body fat percentage, not just worry about weight. You need to make sure you lose the weight where it counts, in your fat stores.

For example: say you weigh 200 pounds and 60 pounds of those are made of fat. You have a 30% body fat. Now, you lose 50 pounds which is a quarter of your weight and quite an achievement.

However, you now have 45 pounds of fat on you which is still 25% of your entire body weight. What happened here is that you did lose fat, but you also lost a lot of muscle tissue as well.

All in all, you may be lighter but you still have too much fat in your body. This is because you emplouyed second grade math tools to what is a fifth grade math problem.

The next time you try to lose fat set your goal in terms of body fat percentage, not in your total pounds.