"Let me take you on a journey beneath the skin,
Let me take you on a journey under the skin,
And we will look together for The Pan Within"
The Waterboys, The Pan Within

What a great track that is, highlight of their live set. Pan is the Greek god of shepherds and flocks and also a god of fertility and carnal desire. I'm not sure what that combination of responsibilities tells us about the practices of the Ancient Greeks. But anyway, the key point is that we're not talking about the thing that you boil your spuds in!

In the last post I explained why fat loss rather than weight loss should be the main goal. But that of course raises the question, how do you know how much fat you have lost? Well to do this you have to be able to measure your body fat percentage.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle gives the low-down on a number of techniques that can be used for this. The most accurate is dissection, but I wouldn't recommend this (unless, of course, you are looking to have that final fat percentage figure inscribed on your gravestone).

Amongst these methods there is one which emerges as the favourite in terms of being the best compromise between practicality and accuracy. The clue is in the lyric above. If you and Mike Scott of The Waterboys were to shrink yourselves down to the microscopic scale and actually undertake a journey under the skin then what you would find would not be The Pan Within but rather a layer of subcutaneous fat. I suppose Mike thought that wouldn't make such an appealing lyric.

The majority of your body's fat is held in these subcutaneous deposits and by measuring a pinch of skin at certain strategic points on the body and applying a mathematical formula you can get a reasonable estimate of your body's fat composition. These are known as skinfold tests and are best done by an experienced practitioner. However, as my next post will explain, you can have a reasonable stab at this in the privacy of your own home.