"How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground."
J. D. Salinger

If you've seen my goals then you'll notice there's no mention at all of any target for weight reduction. There's a really good reason for this, so excuse me if I shout a little:

HOW MUCH YOU WEIGH IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!

Now obviously people's weight is going to vary according to their height, but surely we can factor this out by using Body Mass Index or some such. Well you can but it's still completely misleading. You can take two people, 5' 10" tall, both 12st 7lbs. One could be 12% body fat and in great shape, the other could be 30% body fat and a complete mess. But their BMI would both be the same.

No, what matters is how much fat you're carrying around with you. And 'carrying around' is the crucial phrase because that fat is nothing more than a long-term energy store. Unless you find yourself in a situation where you are deprived for food for any length of time then you're not going to need that energy store.

Taking our examples above, Mr 12% has 21lbs of fat in his body, whilst Mr 30% has 52lbs. That's over 30lbs extra that Mr 30% is lugging around all day, for no good reason. Worse than that, he's got a lot less muscle than Mr 12% to help him carry it. Strap 15 bags of sugar around your person and see how that feels. No wonder he's tired all the time!

And, in case you think these numbers are fanciful the average body fat percentage for a 50-year old man is about 27%. 12% is comfortably achievable and that's where I'm heading.

Now, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is still going to require you to have a weekly weigh-in, so you can check how your lean body mass is doing. But really the J D Salinger answer to how much you should weigh is "enough to stop you floating off into outer space".

"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.

"There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you."
David McCullough

Last time I spoke of fat measuring techniques, skinfold tests and how these are best done by an experienced practitioner. However, on a program such as Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, it's important to be able to get regular assessments of your body fat in order to measure your progress.

Accu-Measure have a range of skinfold calipers which are designed for do-it-yourself body fat measurement. I've got their manual product, the 3000 model, but they also have a digital product. With the 3000 you take a single site measurement at the suprailiac skinfold, just above the point of the hip bone. You then read off a chart to find your body fat percentage. The 3000 has an arm which clicks into place once the right amount of pressure is applied to the skinfold and also has a sliding scale pointer which holds the result after the pressure is released.

This sounds great but in practice it's not that easy to get consistent results. For one thing you need to take the measurement in the exact same spot every time and just being out by 1/2 inch can make quite a difference. Another issue is the 3000 mechanism itself. The friction between the caliper and the sliding scale pointer tends to make the caliper move in a series of jumps rather than in a smooth continuous fashion. This in turn makes the click rather hard to discern.

To try and overcome these problems I use the following process. By taking a reference point from the tip of the hip bone I try as far as possible to always pinch in the same place. On the caliper I don't bother with the sliding scale pointer, leaving this at zero. Instead, when I detect that the device has clicked in I just hold the calipers then look down to take the reading. Then I subtract 6.5 from this, to compensate for the scale pointer not being there. Finally I take a series of readings and take the average.

I'm now five weeks into the programme, so I think it's time for a progress report. As of today I have lost 5.3lbs of fat and gained 0.3lbs of lean body mass. That's a great result and it's an early sign that this process really does work. The important thing is it's fat that is being lost. With conventional diets you lose the pounds, but a substantial part of that will come from a reduction in lean body mass, in other words muscle wastage and water elimination.

The only slight caveat is that the use of the skinfold calipers takes a bit of practice and it's possible that my initial readings were a bit overstated. But whatever, things are definitely heading in the right direction.

There's some visual improvement as well, my stomach doesn't seem to be quite as protuberant as it was. Interestingly, I just put the word 'protuberant' into the Google Toolbar in order to check the spelling and the first search term suggestion it came up with was 'protuberant abdomen'. Those two words obviously go together quite strongly.

In this post I talked about the Accumeasure calipers and the process I was using to try and get consistent results. Well, I still wasn't completely happy in that regard so I've now also acquired some Slimguide calipers.

These are a rather more substantial affair and they use a spring to apply the correct amount of pressure to the skinfold. Rather than the single suprailiac test site used with the Accumeasure, the booklet supplied with the Slimguide describes the four site Durnin and Womersly method. For this method you need an accomplice to take the readings.

So, instead I am using the Jackson and Pollock three site method. The sites can be seen here. The abdomen and thigh readings are easy to do yourself, whilst the chest reading can be done using a mirror. The readings then get applied to a formula, along with your age and out pops your body fat percentage. There is also a Jackson and Pollock three site method for women, but one of these sites is at the back of the arm, so you would need some help for that.

Comparing the results between the two methods I was getting a discrepancy of about 1.5%. I then found a post on the Burn the Fat forum indicating that there was an error for my age range in the extended version of the Accumeasure table that I was using. This error was overstating body fat percentages by about 1.1%. So, as of now I am getting 15.4% body fat from the J-P method and 15.9% from the suprailiac test.

For now, I'm still using the suprailiac test as the main method of tracking, but I might switch over at some point. I've also changed by long term goal to 11% body fat, as I'm sure this is achievable on this new basis.

I've reached a significant milestone today, three months into the regime, so it's time for a progress report and a review of my goals.

Goal: I eat five balanced nutritious meals per day.
Result: I've kept to that pretty well, there's only been a few days where I've had only four meals.

Goal: I avoid all foods on the bad list except, occasionally, white bread and bacon.
Result: My diet is now a lot healthier than it was and in particular my sugar intake much less than it used to be. I eat more saturated fat than the regime recommends. I will get my cholesterol checked after Christmas and if that's not showing any issues then I'm not going to worry about it.

Goal: I exercise daily (except for Sundays), with cardio and weight training on alternate days and I record my results.
Result: I haven't missed a day. I'm up to 29 minutes high intensity cardio on the rowing machine and my weight training is showing good progression through the reps and weights.

Goal: Every week I weigh myself and check body fat and I record these figures.
Result: Achieved.

Goal: I am on track towards reducing my body fat by 3% by December 15th 2006.
Result: I have achieved a 3.7% reduction.

Goal: My improved nutrition and exercise regimes are giving me considerable improvements in motivation and energy.
Result: I certainly noticed this in the early days. Now I think I take it for granted.

Goal: By April 2007 I have lost my spare tyre and am needing to replace all my trousers.
Result: My trousers have certainly got looser. Luckily they've all got belts, so they're still usable at the moment.

Goal: By June 2007 I have a body which I am proud to display on the beach. It is the envy of most 40+ men.
Result: I'm a lot happier with my body shape than I was at the start of the program.

Goal: I am progressing well towards my long term goal of 12% body fat.
Result: I think from now on it's going to be a case of slow but steady process. My revised goal is to lose 1% body fat every three months over the course of 2007, arriving at my new target figure of 11%.

It’s my birthday today, 52 years old. As with many people it’s also the first day back working after the Christmas and New Year festivities. Not much of a way to spend your birthday you might think, but actually I’m quite happy about it. It’s been a good break, but it will be nice to get back to the old routine again.

Those festivities have certainly taken their toll on my weight and my girth. I’m three pounds up on my pre-Christmas weight and my body fat is up by 1%. I’ve missed a few weight training sessions, but I’ve kept the cardio going, so mostly it’s down to too much of the wrong kind of food and too much alcohol.

The consolation is that, having been on the program for the past three months, I’ve got a bit of leeway to spare. If I hadn’t been on the program then I’m sure that my weight would have now hit a new record high. In a few weeks of eating well and exercising well I should be back on track and pushing towards breaking through 14% body fat.

Like everyone else we grossly over-cater at Christmas. Through the month of January we gradually whittled our way through various left-over bits and pieces, so not much went to waste in the end. We had also frozen some bags of turkey meat and the last of these went in a curry yesterday.

I've now also got back to the level the fat reduction that I had achieved before Christmas. I've re-published my weight loss chart (or more correctly my fat loss chart) in celebration of this. Actually this doesn't quite show the worst of it. Checking on my spreadsheet I see that I didn't record my figures between 21st Dec and 2nd Jan. I'm sure the real peak was a bit higher than that shown.

It just goes to show that it's much easier to gain the fat than it is to lose it. But Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is a lifestyle change, not a diet. You can put it on hold for a short while but the important thing is to pick up and continue from where you left off.

Measuring your body fat percentage through the use of skinfold calipers or some other method is an important part of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. For the past three months I have been recording two sets of skinfold results in parallel.

The first of these is a suprailiac skinfold measurement, following on from the method used by my original Accumeasure calipers. The second uses the three-point Jackson Pollock method, with readings taken from the chest, stomach and thighs.

Having gained experience with the latter method with my Slimguide calipers I am now fairly confident that it is more accurate. The problem with the suprailiac skinfold is that it seems to be very sensitive to where you pinch.

So, from now on I will be basing my fat percentage results solely on the three-point readings. However, these readings tend to come in lower than the suprailiac measurements, on average coming in at 1.7% less. So I will be adding this value to the measurement in order to keep consistency with past results and my goals.

I've been on the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle programme now for nearly six months so it's now time to be brave and show the transformation that's been achieved over that time.

If you've seen a number of sites like this then you'll appreciate that there are certain conventions that should be observed for transformation pictures:

Complexion
Before: Dracula's younger brother
After: Baywatch extra

Hair
Before: Dragged through a hedge backwards
After: This cut cost me a fortune!

Facial expression
After: I've just won the lottery!
Before: My ex-wife/husband has just won the lottery!!

Posture
Before: Neanderthal
After: Atten...shun!

Stomach
Before: I've just had six pints of lager and a vindaloo.
After: If I hold this in any tighter I'm going to rupture myself.

In defiance of this I've tried to make the pictures like-for-like. Possibly I'm holding my stomach in a little on the after picure, but hopefully you can see that there's been some real progress.

I've now been on the programme for six months, so this is a good time to take a review.

As regards progress I'm now much more happy with my body shape than I was at the start and hopefully that is conveyed by my transformation pictures. I've lost a lot of fat. I haven't put on as much muscle as perhaps I expected, but that has been constrained for the last three months by my Rotator Cuff Injury. I'm pretty much through that now and I will be completely revamping my weight training regime starting from next week.

Do I feel better? It's really hard to say as the changes come in small increments and you continually adapt to your current state as being the norm. But I think the answer is probably that I do. I've got pretty good energy at the moment and I've made it through the winter without picking up a cold, despite my wife bringing home a couple of quite severe bouts.

So what of the programme? It certainly produces results. It isn't easy. Anyone who promises you a weight loss programme that is easy, sustainable and with no health risks is lying to you. On the other hand it isn't that hard. When first you look at the recommendations for nutrition and exercise your immediate thought is "I'm not sure I can do that". Tom has a simple and powerful answer to that, namely that hundreds of people manage to do it successfully, many of them overcoming much greater obstacles than those that you face. And sure enough after a month the changes have become habit and after six months you can't imagine living any other way.

In summary I would say that the ebook has been the second best purchase that I have ever made. The first? The dating agency subscription through which I met my wonderful wife.