BODY FAT PERCENTAGE

What is body fat percentage?

The amount of body fat you carry, your body fat percentage, makes a difference to your body shape and your health. The charts below show how much body fat is healthy.

Your shape is affected by body fat percentage because muscle tissue is more compact than fat - a balloon containing 1lb of muscle tissue would be smaller than a balloon containing 1lb of fat!

So a woman, 5' 6" tall weighing 140lbs (10 stone) who does regular resistance training, will have a lower body fat percentage, and look slimmer, than a woman of the same height and weight who doesn't exercise and therefore has a higher ratio of body fat.

Measuring changes in body fat percentage, rather than just measuring changes in weight, can be very motivational when you're dieting - especially if you are exercising as part of your weight loss regime. Therefore, it is more useful to gauge your progress with weight loss by your body fat percentage, or body measurements than by weight alone. For this reason body mass index results can be misleading as they do not allow for increase in lean body tissue (muscle), which increases the number of calories the body can burn and in the long term will help maintain weight loss.
For every 1 pound of muscle you build you will burn an extra 35-50 calories per day!! So if you build an extra 10pounds of muscle you will burn an extra 350-500 calories per day!!

Body Fat Charts

The percentage of body fat you have affects not only your weight and shape, but also affects your health.

Q. How much body fat is too much, or even too little?

A. That depends on two important factors, whether you are a man or a woman, and how old you are.

Below are four body fat charts that show body fat ranges for the whole family. There is a body fat chart for men aged 7-18, men aged 18-79, women aged 7-18 and women aged 18-79.

Male Aged 7 - 18


Male Aged 18 - 79


Female Aged 7 - 18



Female Aged 18 - 79



Calculate your BMI

When comparing a body fat chart for men to a body fat chart for women you can see that women steadily increase their percentage body fat as they go through life, staying within a healthy fat range. Whereas male body fat percentage fluctuates during puberty before following the same adult pattern in body fat increments seen in the body fat chart for women.

And throughout life from adulthood women can have a body fat percentage 10% higher than a man of the same age who is of a healthy body fat range and still be in their healthy body fat range.

Charts supplied courtesy of Tanita Ltd, data from:

Body Fat Ranges for Standard Children
Body Fat Reference Curves for children Targeted at BMJ (British Medical Journal) Draft 1-AMP 19 June (by Dr Andrew)

Gallagher D et al. Am J Clin Nutr 2000,72:694-701. "Healthy percentage body fat ranges: an approach for developing guidelines based on body mass index."

Body Fat Ranges for Standard Adults
Based on NIH/WHO BMI Guidelines

As reported by Gallagher, et al, at NY Obesity Research Center. To determine the percentage of body fat that is appropriate for your body, consult your physician.