WEIGHT LOSS TIPS

A Free Body Fat Percentage Calculator

There's a way you can test your body fat percentage online. All you need is a cloth tape to measure different parts of your body.

The test tells you how much fat you have and how much muscle you have. The test is supposed to be quite accurate (within a couple of percentage points either way) except for very fit people who can get up to 5% higher number for their body fat than what they actually have (because they have much more muscle than the typical person) and very skinny but unfit people may show 5% less body fat than they actually have because "though they look thin, unfit skinny people really have more than the usual amount of fat inside their muscles, which you can't see from the outside."

The most valuable aspect of taking this test is doing it over time. If you plan to start exercising, you will see noticeable changes in the measurements over time.

Try the body fat percent test here.

The average American man has 22% of body fat. The average American female has 32%. But these are not healthy percentages.

A healthy normal body fat differs for different people. According to the makers of this test, healthy percentage of body fat would be 15% for a Caucasian male and 22% for a Caucasian female. Whereas it would be only 12% for an African-American male and 19 percent for an African-American female. Asians have the highest 'healthy ratio' at 18 and 25 percent for males and females. The difference is due to the bone frames having significantly different weights on average. Asians are much more likely to have porous bones that don't weigh as much relative to other races.

I've never heard this type of distinction before. Someone please tell me if this is complete bunk.

Alicia Silverstone, age 30, became a vegan recently. Her story is featured in next month's Shape magazine.

She says that at first she seemed to be eating all carbs; lots of pasta, bread and fruit smoothies. This caused her some energy crashes by midday. After she changed her diet and added a lot more vegetables and whole grains she started to feel good all day. She had much more energy and also noticed great improvements in her skin, hair and body.

For the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday she looks forward to a vegan feast of salads, green beans with almonds, stuffing, fall vegetables like brussels sprouts, tofu casserole and pumpkin pie.

Update January 2010: See the scoop on The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone

The BBC reports that Nicole Richie has checked herself in to a treatment centre. It is probably to help deal with her anorexia.

The filming for The Simple Life, in which she stars with Paris Hilton, has been postponed. She has gotten extremely skinny and frail. But her publicist says she is not there because she is anorexic, but rather because she needs to focus on nutrition. He says this is not about treatment for an eating disorder.

Regardless of any public statments, for Nicole Richie to do this of her own volition, it seems like a very good sign for her future good health.

PastaQueen has one of the best personal stories of weight loss progress online. She is 25 years old and used to weigh 372 pounds. This week she is down to 203 pounds. Her goal is to lose 43 more and get down to 160 pounds. (She is 5'9" tall.)

She tells us her new weight every Monday. (It doesn't always go down each week.) This Monday she could potentially get below 200 pounds and that would mean, that for the first time in her adult life, she will be crossing the threshold from obese to simply overweight.

That's a huge accomplishment, especially considering that when she first started losing weight she was not only morbidly obese, but super morbidly obese (according to BMI calculations). She had a couple of false starts at the beginning of her online diary but started losing weight in earnest two years ago.

See her inspiring weight loss progress photos here. (You can rotate them 360 degrees.)

Congrats to PastaQueen and wishing you a very happy 26th birthday!

Greg Overholtzer made the decision to change his life and begin dieting and exercising about four years ago. At that time he weighed a dangerously obese 600 pounds. Today he is down to 242 pounds.

He started by working out to Richard Simmons tapes (which he had bought several years previously but which had been collecting dust up to then). He worked out in his bedroom consistently and though it exhausted him at first, he soon saw encouraging results. He then starting using the Richard Simmons Food Mover tool which is a program with windows that you shut after you've eaten a particular item for the day and when all the windows are shut you have to stop eating.

The main change he made to his diet was to drop all foods that contained sugar or wheat and to emphasize vegetables and proteins.

Today he has a new lease on life. See the full story in the Evening Sun.