Forget Body Mass Index (BMI)… your weight number hides more than it reveals!
Will Dahlgren of InBody USA, Amy Hudson, and Dr. Fisher explain why body composition is the real key to your health, why strength training is essential as you age, and why personal training should be guided by data, not just the scale.
Show Notes
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TRANSCRIPT
And once you’ve lost that muscle, it’s harder to add back on. You know, your heart needs calories, your brain needs calories, you know, all our systems that we don’t think about, they need energy too. The most helpful thing you can do is compare yourself to your previous self and perhaps your intended future self. Welcome to the Strength Changes everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing I’m Amy Hudson.
I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co hosts are Brian Sigan, co founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence based strength training. And now for today’s episode Welcome to the Strength Changes everything podcast. Today’s episode is all about body composition. We’re going to talk about Body composition devices, how those are different from a regular scale, and what body composition means. If you are on any kind of a weight loss journey, on a health journey, we’re going to teach you in this episode why it’s important to pay attention to not only the number on a scale, your weight, but also what body composition is, how you can understand it, and what it means in terms of benchmarking your health journey. With us today to talk all things body composition is Will Dahlgren. He is from In Body USA and he works, which is one of the leading body composition devices in the industry. So he’s going to Chat with us today all things metabolism, body composition, interpreting trends, understanding data, and really what it all means for you. So this is going to be a really helpful episode if this is something that you’ve done before or are considering starting to do.
If you are a GLP1 user, we’ve talked a little bit about this as well, about how maintaining muscle mass is important and how body composition and data can help us track that as well. So I hope that this has primed your pump for the content of this episode. Will, welcome to the Strength Changes everything podcast, first of all. Yeah, thank you for having me, Amy. Dr. Fisher, appreciate it and excited to be here. Yeah, I would love for you to just start off by introducing yourself a little bit more to our audience. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with In Body USA and what you do?
Absolutely. So I was an exercise science graduate and moved out of Minnesota to Southern California just to catch some sun. It’s pretty where I went to school, it’s pretty gray. So, got a job at 24 hour fitness, and part of that role was standing at the front of the club doing caliper measurements and offering body fat assessments to people as they walked in. To say that was awkward would be an understatement, and there wasn’t much participation because of the nature of that test of like, you know, skin fold calipers and actually pinching people in public. And so that was my first real introduction to the commercial space and body composition. At that same role, I would lose clients to the scale. Their pants weren’t fitting. They felt better. They looked better, all these things, but the scale wasn’t moving the way they wanted it to.
And that was always hard for me to describe to them and kind of convey in a way that made them stay because they only saw that number. So I was also an athlete. I was always told BMI, you know, your BMI is high, but you’re okay because you play sports. So, kind of combining those two experiences, when I interviewed with Embody, I was very skeptical of BIA technology. And they said, We appreciate that because I’ve used it before and I didn’t think it was very accurate. They said, We love that skepticism. We think you’re going to like what we have. And so, after learning more about it, we have a really intensive training at Embody for the Embody to understand BIA, what makes us unique in the market, and so on and so forth. And so, through that process, I was, my eyes were open to our proprietary way of obtaining body composition measurements. And the rest is history. You know, that was in 2013. And since then, I’ve, it’s a weird niche to be in, but I’m like a body composition enthusiast, you could say in a weird way. But it’s, a really rewarding because I think worthwhile message to be talking about and spreading.
So yeah, that’s the Cliff Notes version. There’s things that happened in between, but that’s how I got started was personal training, seeing the struggles there and really being able to lend a hand to those personal trainers with our InBody device. Excellent. Now, for listeners, could you just briefly to find what’s BIA in define what’s BIA in case somebody’s not familiar with that term? Oh, yeah, jumping ahead. So BIA is a method of testing body composition. There are a lot of different ways. There’s like air displacement. You can get a dual energy Xray an MRI, an ultrasound.
BIA is bioelectrical impedance analysis. And so it tends to be the least invasive and fastest way to get a body composition measurement. And it’s just sending really weak electrical currents through your body and voltage and measuring basically how much resistance does your body give those currents? Muscle is 73 water or above. So we know that lean mass has a lot of water in it and body fat has very little. And so BIA uses that current to basically measure your water and from there extrapolate these other items because other items, other data points like body fat, visceral fat, intra extracellular water, because body fat’s always deduced.
That’s like a, you know, if somebody’s going to directly measure your body count, you should run because it means it’s cadaver. That’s really the only direct way because body fat is so hard to measure. So yeah, that’s like BIA is just this noninvasive fast way to get a lot of data about yourself. That’s not just a weight. Excellent. Okay, perfect. Well, so I want to ask you some questions from the perspective of somebody who works with clients who are just starting to look at their body composition as opposed to a conventional scale at home. And maybe is in a perspective shift or at the beginning stages of a perspective shift about what my weight means versus body composition to my overall health.
So, how would you answer the question is how are body composition reports, scales, devices different from a conventional scale? Absolutely. So, the conventional scale is going to give you that one number, your total weight, and our argument and what body composition is, is the sum or like the different parts that make up that weight. And so we focus on water, muscle, and body fat. And through those, we think that’s a healthier way to veer your body because those impact your health way more than just your overall weight. So instead of just looking at the sum of like your muscle, how much water is in that muscle, and your body fat, we think looking at each individual marker is a healthier way. And that’s the big difference, you know me and you were not weights. We are made up of water, muscle, and fat. And so by looking at those items, we’re better able to address health concerns and assess like progress if we start exercising or, you know, start eating better or less or really making any change to our lifestyle that we’re hoping will have a positive impact because weight can change for a variety of reasons.
I mean, if we all went out for like tacos and beer after this, our, our Tacos and beer after this, our weight would be a little bit up because we’d be holding a little bit more water after that salty meal and the alcohol. Doesn’t exactly mean we gained a bunch of body fat or that we’re incredibly less healthy. It just means in that moment we weigh a little more. Those fluctuations don’t tell the whole story when you look at weight alone. I think this is really important because a lot of the time when people begin strength training, there’s an anxiety that either their weight doesn’t change or their weight might even go up as they begin to add lean muscle tissue. And of course, the reality is that there’s a Big shift if they see that number change or stay the same or change in that way, that’s probably a drastic change in their body composition. If they just step in on the scales, they’re not seeing that metric change. Whereas using a body composition device where they can see an estimate of body fat, an estimate of lean tissue and so forth, then at least they can get a good guide of what’s actually happening within their physiology rather than just that single metric of body mass us.
Absolutely. I call it the honeymoon period. It’s where muscle is going up and fat are going down at an equal rate. Weight is staying the same. But like, if I think we could all agree, if I could just lose body fat and gain muscle simultaneously, I would take that, you know, every day. I think everybody would. Yeah, but it doesn’t last forever. It feels really good in that time period. That’s why I call it the honeymoon because it, you know, eventually diminished returns set in, like, there isn’t just a straight line to the top of wellness or body comp. And that’s like To me, it’s a beautiful thing. I know it can be frustrating for folks who are focused on that weight number, but there’s just, you know, there aren’t a whole lot of other healthier things that you could do than like lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously.
It’s really hard to do. So, yeah, it’s super common though at that, you know, first month, maybe three, maybe one to three months, something like that. Would you guess that if you took a baseline of an average of 100 people baseline How many out of those 100 would probably need to, in order to improve their metabolic health, add muscle and lose body fat as opposed to maybe gain muscle but their fat is fine? Do you have any figures about that? I mean, because I think it’s easy to, I think we do believe that most people want that.
I do think that’s probably the great majority of people, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, but I mean, is it possible that some somebody’s doesn’t have enough body fat. How frequent is that? Oh, for sure. Yeah, there’s extremes on both ends. And I know people look sometimes at the thin side of it and think like, oh, I wish I had that problem. It’s it’s not it’s a real problem for some people to put on body fat and we need fat like that needs to be addressed to we. Absolutely. It’s essential. If you get too low on body fat, it will cause hormonal disruption. You won’t sleep there’s a lot of issues associated with being very, very low on the body fat scale side of things. I would say it’s more rare in You know, I would say it’s somewhere in like the two to three percent range. The most common body type we see in America, anyway, is the over fat but also over muscle population. So we tend to have a lot of both in the States. But our device was actually invented or like created by a Korean engineer named Dr. Cha.
And he, their problem was BMI was telling them, like, hey, 95 your population is a healthy weight. You know, so things should look good on the back end for diagnosis. But what they were seeing was like the same increase in cardiovascular issues and disease and heart disease and diabetes that we were. But we were seeing weight go up here in the States. They weren’t. And what was happening is the muscle was just low. So they weren’t, you know, that was something that they needed to work on. Their weight looked okay, but the body fat was always higher because of a lack of muscle mass. And so it really does depend on the demo of who you’re looking at in terms of like the most common goal and a common body composition, too. I imagine that changes too over, over depending on the fads of the time and sort of the don’t you think and the culture and the yeah, yeah, we’ve demoed, you know name names, but we’ve all, you know, there was a fad in, I would say like early, like maybe the 80s and 90s was just like thin was the way to be, like absolutely as thin as possible.
And that was damaging too, because people were just losing muscle mass and lean mass. And that’s not healthy. You know, that’s not making us healthier. It’s just making us lighter at the end of the day. And so you’re 100 hit the nail on the head that fads and what’s in at the time changes a lot too. It’s kind of like, it’s a fun part of body count, but also frustrating because it would be nice if things just stayed the same for a while. But it’s always in flux. It’s interesting you say that about sort of the 80s. We might be about to revisit that era. And of course, most fads and fashions are cyclical in nature. And I know we were going to talk about this later on, but with the current, Sort of use of GLP 1 and medical weight loss, there seems to be very much an Approach to, you know, just looking at the number of the stales and monitoring weight loss and not having so much concern for our metabolic health, our strength, and our physical function. You know, muscle, of course, helps regulate glucose and maintaining muscle and strength is our independence as we age.
So, you know, it’s a concern. For me and I know obviously the exercise coach practitioners as well, um, that while people are on a GLP one journey, which is, you know, absolutely fine between them and their physician, engaging in strength training is absolutely the best thing they can do to, to maintain a healthy body composition, not just get as light as they can. Absolutely. Um, you know, that’s where I know at the I think at the start of this, fitness was looking at it a bit like competition, but in reality, this should be this is a huge boon for the fitness industry because whether they’re in your doors now or they come later, it will happen. What we’ve seen is that the lack of appetite leads to just not consuming enough calories to even support. Your heart needs calories, your brain needs calories, all our systems that we don’t think about, that they run on autopilot, they need energy too. And our bodies are built for survival. So what happens is, you know, when you only give it 800 calories a day, it’s going to your heart, your brain your systems that keep you alive, and your body starts shedding muscle mass because muscle mass needs those maintenance calories as well.
And so we’ve worked extensively with the GLP1 It’s been a boon for our business too, because as these practitioners start to see the effects, they’re like, oh, I need to be tracking body comp on a more regular basis with these patients to make sure they’re having the outcome they want for the long run. Because, you know, in Short term, the scale could look good, some of the numbers could look good, but if you’re losing muscle mass, it just drags your metabolic rate with it. And, you know, then unless you’re on GOP1 for the rest of your life, when you get off of it, you know, your metabolic engine is slower. And so a lot of times that weight comes back on. Yeah, absolutely. And once you’ve Lost that muscle, it’s harder to add back on, especially, you know, as we go through a natural kind of sarcopenia as we age and we’ll naturally lose muscle anyway.
We don’t want to give away what we’ve got for the sake of just looking at the number on the scale. So, yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I always argue muscle is harder to gain than fat is to lose because you can’t gain muscle just sitting on the couch or eating differently. You have to get up, go to the exercise. You know, put in your work and do that over time. Whereas body fat can change just by eating different. You can lose fat, not moving as much as you should. And then to gain it, it is a slower progress. It’s slower. Muscle is so hard to gain. And so I always, when you say hold on to it, you’re just speaking my language. I tell everybody that just like, it’s your firstborn, just hold that thing tight and try to keep any muscle mass you can.
Because it’s so important. Actually, on that note, Will, so that brings up a question that we sometimes get from clients who are on a strength training journey. They want to perhaps lose fat but maintain muscle or gain muscle and add it. Many people start off the program actually under muscled. They can see a body composition reading that shows them that they’re here with their muscle mass and they really need to be here with their muscle mass and add that in. Oftentimes it’s because they haven’t strength trained intentionally for perhaps a decade, which is very common. Sarcopenia happens, which means our natural metabolic trajectory is to lose that muscle. And so we have to strength train. But what happens? You know, sometimes we see a body composition reading where strength, we see strength improvements in a client, but their muscle mass does not yet go up.
What could cause that? So there’s like a couple things that could cause it. You know, if they change up their diet so that maybe they’re eating less glucose, muscle holds glucose in two parts water. So what happens is they start to flush water. Our device reads that as, it is technically less lean mass, but it was what we would call low quality lean mass. So they start to flush that water and that can cause a temporary perceived drop in that lean body mass number, but it does level off. And you do see that lean mass typically return. The other thing could be, you know, our nervous system like strength doesn’t always correlate to actual muscle gain due to like maybe better form during the exercise. That’s a piece of it. There’s also like the nervous system adaptations that can occur that aren’t exactly driven by, you know, bigger muscles. So it really can be a couple of different factors there. It doesn’t exactly mean, you know, that they lost the quality muscle that we’re looking for. It’s just more of a temporary shift in body water that they’re seeing and can be perceived, or, you know, our device can’t tell if it was high quality lean mass or low quality.
That’s where the strength training would be. That’s where I would rely on that. It’s like, hey, you got rid of most likely inflammation, which is extracellular water, some of that inflammation. So the device is reading you as a little less lean mass, but we can see here the strength is good. So you’re building more quality muscle over time with less inflamed lean mass. Yeah. And so to summarize, we should celebrate that decrease in inflammation because it shows that you’re on the right metabolic track, right? Absolutely. And you’re probably cleaning up your diet. And we should celebrate those neural adaptations that your muscles have made to getting started on a strength training journey because it’s positioning them to build more and more strength from here on out.
And so it’s important to remember, yeah, that sometimes our muscles can build density. Meaning maybe the volume. That they seem to be from a reading is the same, but they’re stronger for the size that they are. And that’s actually a good thing, right? Oh, it’s huge. It’s such a, it’s again, just like something I think we’d all do if we could, but there are like a diminished return aspect of it. The other part is like, if you do lose a decent amount of weight, let’s say, you know, you lose 30 pounds. Well, that’s like a lot. 30 pounds less that you’re carrying around every day doing every single thing that you do throughout the day. So, like every step you take and every stair you go up is 30 less pounds, which can just lead to a little less lean mass because you don’t have to support as much as you used to.
That’s not a bad thing either. That’s also something to celebrate and look at as a really positive change as opposed to some type of failure on my part or on my trainer’s part. That isn’t the idea at all. So, yeah, those changes can feel maybe not so good in the moment. We all have this idea in our heads of what we should be. I hear that a lot like, oh, I’m not where I should be. But in reality, any small inflammation reduction, muscle gain, fat loss should be looked at positively in my opinion. I think you touched on something really interesting there with just the statement I’m not where I should be. A lot of people take a single measurement. I might take a BIA measurement today and look at it and look at my body composition and so forth and say, oh, that’s not where I want to be. But ultimately, there’s a lot more to be said for tracking this over time and looking at kind of trend. Is it on the right trajectory let’s say, rather than just a single snapshot? Do you have this? This is a tangent from what we talked about pre podcast, but do you have kind of recommendations on how often somebody should look at their body composition?
Yeah. I mean, once a month is really pretty fast. 30 days isn’t that much time for the body to adapt. You can see changes in those periods of time, but that’s about as quick as I would go unless you’re really. You’re curious is the Ago, unless you’re really curious, is the way I would put it. And in a commercial setting, I wouldn’t let somebody get on it every day, but I actually have two devices behind me. So if I change something, I do like to do it every day because I understand, like, oh, there goes that water, or there, you know, here goes, you know, this portion. It’s super interesting to me. That doesn’t mean that it’s exactly anything I should worry about or concern myself with day to day changes. Once a month, I would say, and Saying, kind of going back to where you should be, I can tell you who I’ve done like 30000 tests.
Every single person pretty much tells me like I’m higher in body fat than I want to be, whether they’re at like single digits or they’re, you know, 25 It doesn’t, it’s all a perception of where we think we should be. And that’s why the device is not meant for that one time test. That’s just a moment in time. Like it doesn’t diagnose anything. It’s all about tracking. It’s all about you were here, you know, day one. You’re here day 30. Here you are day 60. It’s information so that we can either change course or keep going on the path that we were on. Cause it’s really just feedback that your body’s giving on what it likes and what it doesn’t. And I think we all know too that people respond differently to different nutritional regimens, different Exercise routines. So it’s really just more informing you and proving to you what works and what doesn’t. I have so many thoughts, Will, as you’re talking. I like the idea of why do I want this number? Why do I want this reading? What am I doing that would make me expect a different reading today than maybe last month?
Or have I changed anything? You know what I’m saying? Because if I have left my nutrition completely alone, I don’t know what I should be really expecting to look that different. Am I strength training? Am I getting adequate dietary protein? Like, what am I really looking for in terms of the behaviors and the inputs that I’m giving myself to show up here? And I think it’s helpful to actually start by asking yourself what inputs can I say that I’ve done? And what story am I looking to see evidence of, maybe, you know, in this reading?
Or if I haven’t done anything, I can’t then be disappointed if it’s not what I wanted it to be, right? I think it’s important to sort of sometimes remind yourself and take that step back. But it also brings up the question, you know, there are factors that influence a reading on a given day. Like you said, it’s a snapshot. And what are the factors that Somebody should keep in mind when taking any daily given reading that may impact that day’s reading? It’s all about like expectation, right? Like what is your expectation? Some people think they’re gonna lose 15 pounds in 30 days and it’s like, well, timeout. Like, let’s take a quick TO ’cause that’s unrealistic. But the factors people should really look at, I think the most important is trying to keep conditions the same or similar. So if you test at 3pm Pm The first time, just try to test at 3 pm again. Factors are, you know, there’ll be a similar factors at play. You know, you’ve had your coffee in the morning, which is totally fine. And you’ll be able to track change more effectively. Like a lot of people ask me, like, when’s the best time to do my body comp?
And what that question actually means is lowest. When will I read my lowest so that I can feel good about it? And I always tell them that’s like, you don’t, the, the is not to game the system. The point is to see if what you’re doing is working the way you want it to. And so I always harp on keeping conditions as similar as possible. And so part of that is controlling what we can do, like use the restroom before the test, do it before you exercise. If you can, you know, take things out of your pockets or test in similar clothing, I think that’s always a best practice that we can control. You know, I think everyone likes to harp on the hydration piece. Water is always important, and you should always be trying to maintain hydration. But again, like too many factors at play there for you to really say, like, here’s your dialed in perfect hydration status. Because we can’t measure hydration. D2O can measure water, but even hydration is of much debate of like what is it and when are you hydrated. So I always say, like, just similar, like, try to keep it as similar as you possibly can prior to your test.
And you will see the change and you will track change effectively, regardless of whether it’s, you know, you’re going to read a percent body fat lower or higher at that moment in time. It’s really just about trying to keep conditions the same. Okay. Yeah, that’s helpful. And I know even for women, I’ve heard the recommendation to avoid testing during like a menstrual cycle. Yeah, more extracellular water. Typically, I’ve seen it go both ways too. So it’s a typical response, but it isn’t across the board. So, yeah, that’s a recommendation. You know, no pacemakers or pregnant women.
Those are contraindications, just at large, don’t take the test. But, yeah, in general, we see the most success from conditions staying about the same. What are the inputs then that make the most difference? And I have some answers and ideas that we educate clients with, but I’m curious to hear your perspective. When we think about our metabolism, our metabolic health, you know, we talked in the past that most of us are trying to improve our muscle mass. And that lean mass, it’s the engine of our future metabolism. It’s indicative of our, you know, ability to burn calories every day. It’s protective. It’s our future Dr. Fisher mentioned earlier, it’s huge and it’s our only hope for our future metabolic health, right? So, what are the biggest factors if somebody does want to add muscle mass? What should they make sure that they’re doing? Maybe they’ve strength trained for six months to a year and they really are looking to get to the next level.
What are the things they should factor in? Well, I mean, the consumption of Calories there is going to be really important. We, on our device, provide a basal metabolic rate, which is, I call them coma calories. It’s morbid, but it’s like if you laid down for 24 hours, didn’t move a single voluntary muscle, that’s how much energy your body would need to keep you the way you are. So, two to 300 more just gets you to resting metabolic, which assumes you’re going to work, taking care of business around the house, that type of thing. And then any exertion is on top of that. So when you’re looking to gain muscle, you’re often exerting a lot at the gym or, you know, through your movement, which adds to the caloric burn. And that makes it harder to get above and into a calorie surplus, which is something you’re going to need to build more muscle.
Beyond that, the hydration piece comes in, you know, I hate to use the example, but we’ve Seen the juice out at the gym with the gallon jug of water. And that’s because it’s important. Um, most of your muscle is water. So, you know, doing that piece is, is a really big deal, but most of it’s going to be driven by how you’re moving and how much you’re moving. Um, uh, the rest periods that occur in between that movement, like, and really that calorie consumption. I mean, can do things that are, I don’t know, on the edge.
If you take testosterone, you’re going to gain muscle. If you take, you know, exogenous testosterone or like HGH, something along those lines. But naturally, it’s, you know, there’s a lot of factors that come into play, but it’s primarily driven by how you move, how much you’re eating, you know, sleep comes into play there because your body will start to naturally produce more of those. How do you say that? The testosterone and the hormones that will help you build muscle will start to naturally occur a little bit more. And so, yeah, really, I think that movement piece is hard because some people’s hard is not, you know, what’s hard to me might not be hard to Dr. Fisher.
And so I might be struggling over here thinking I’m giving it everything I got, but in reality, I’ve got to push a little bit further. And it’s not always heavyweight, especially if you’re trying to add muscle. It can be the volume. It’s mostly about the volume that you’re doing in terms of your movement. So I know y’all got that dialed in better than maybe me, but that’s just in my experience what I’ve seen. Got it. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because sometimes you have to really, it sounds like you need to be intentional. If you want your outcomes to be something specific, it really does mean you have to address all the factors over here in terms of the inputs.
How frequently am I strength training? How hard am I working? How is my water intake? How is my sleep? How is my stress? How is, you know, the rest of my nutrition? Because it all plays a factor, and I think it’s important to remind her too, especially for people over 40 who have sarcopenia, you know, perhaps happening in the background, a natural decline in their muscle mass, we need to work harder to preserve the muscle mass we have and even build it, right? Then we used to have to work in our 20s. And for even females, too, my understanding is, you know, because of the drop in estrogen and the closer a female gets to menopause as well, they do have a very high tendency, if they’re undereating, for their body then to target that muscle mass for energy.
So many times females like to under eat in order to achieve a certain weight, but in the process they’re actually losing that muscle mass and so all of that can then backfire if their goal is actually metabolic health later. Yeah, no, you hit the nail on the head there. Like most other things, it’s harder for women to gain muscle mass. And so, I know it It can seem, what do I say, hollow? But even just maintaining muscle mass is this huge win as we age, especially if you get up to like 50 plus, I mean, if we’re just maintaining that muscle mass, to me, that’s like a huge win.
And why I say just hold on to it, whatever you can do to hold onto your muscle mass, um, and just keep it in place, I think is a huge win. Uh, cause again, it kind of, it does go back to expectation to, uh, like muscle is very, very difficult to gain, especially if you’re like forging new territories. So to speak. You’ve never had this much muscle mass before, and you’re pushing to get into this territory, makes it even harder. And so, just that maintenance, I think, is a very underrated goal or like expectation for people because it’s way harder than people think, too. It’s, you know, you still got to work at it pretty hard just to keep it, which, you know, might be a bummer to some, but at least you know, and you really got to take action on it. Otherwise, it will drop. It’s just a matter of time. Time is Undefeated. I always think this is such an interesting discussion because there are so many women in 25 something years in academia and research and strength training practitioners, as a strict training practitioner. The number of women I spoke to who said that they don’t want to get bulky from lifting weights.
And I always kind of joke and say, hey, if my Was that easy to put on, then every other guy would be, you know, built like Arnold or, or, you know, uh, built like a bodybuilder. It’s not, it’s so metabolically expensive. Our body will literally resist. We have, uh, you know, genetic traits to resist us from, from building muscle. So it’s incredibly hard to add. Um, so yeah, as you say, if we can retain what we’ve got, it’s not necessarily a adding it, if we’re going through an aging cycle, you know, from your forties to fifties, and you can keep hold of all the muscle you had in your forties, that’s a big win. It is. And something Amy mentioned was like stress. So sometimes people that I talk to are going through a loss in their family or a big change in their life that’s very, very stressful.
They lost their job or things like that. And they start to like question why I’m, you know, I should be making this progress still. And, you know, in my head, I’m thinking, you know, life’s bigger than just your body comp, you know? So if we can just keep this habit of exercising, that’s a win too. And if you can maintain at this time, that’s good. Your life happens. And I don’t think we can be expected to be, you know, like perfectly healthy through, uh, maybe tragedies in our lives or big losses that really impact our stress levels. And that’s something I think, you know, that should be addressed too, is just there is no summit to the wellness mountain. Like there is no time where we get to drop the mic, walk away and say like, yeah, I’m healthy. I did it. It’s, it’s always a work in progress.
So, you know, this expectation of, I think sometimes people reaching Valhalla, whatever you want to call it is, misguided and they should be reminded that, Hey, life is big. It’s very important. That’s why you’re here. We want to help you live that life in a healthy way for as long as possible. But at the same time, I’d hope you’d take care of your sick parents and not maybe come three times a week and you cut it down parent and not, you know, maybe come, you know, three times a week and you cut it down to one.
That’s okay. You know, but we’re going to be here when this time passes too. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, we’re pretty hard on ourselves in general. And so, yeah, I think sometimes our device gets, uh, uh, lumped in with this idea, or it becomes this shame device, which is the exact opposite of what any of us want. That is like, we are hoping that people, it simplifies their idea of their body instead of creating any kind of feeling that wouldn’t be positive, I guess, or just like informative would be a better word. So, yeah, that’s kind of sparked a lot because, yeah, it’s a big issue, I think. It’s interesting to think of all the biometric data we have available and how it does change our psyche. You know, we look at our sleep habits, a lot of people track it on their garment or their aura ring or so forth, and people are literally losing sleep over their sleep, and you know they’re getting stressed out over it. Or they are they getting enough steps in during the day? Now, if they look at their step count and that drives them to go and increase their step count, that’s fine.
But ultimately, all of these metrics are just information. They’re not things to to change our anxiety levels over. They’re things to maybe change our habits over. So it’s an interesting kind of time we live in with with all this information. Definitely, it is, and will just to spell this out. So, just in case somebody doesn’t know, I mean, so stress impacts our body composition. Because is there more to it than this? My understanding is that, you know, when we’re going through a high stress time, we just have more cortisol floating around in our body, and cortisol really signals our body to store fat and hang on to fat for dear life.
Is there more to it than that? But I think that’s, I know that that can happen and people don’t like to hear that. Absolutely. I think they’re downstream of think there are downstream effects of that cortisol spike. So if you’re stressed, like Dr. Fisher mentioned, maybe you didn’t sleep as well. And then maybe you’re just not as energized the next day and you take less steps. And then it leads to this like circling or just kind of like compounding negative benefits or they’re not benefits, compounding negative feedback. It’s similar to when somebody goes out for a hard night at party It’s not just the partying and all this of partying. It’s like, it’s not just the partying and all the drinks and the lack of sleep, but it’s the next day when you’re like, oh, I need it. I need something to soak this all up. I need a greasy meal. Oh, I didn’t, you know, I didn’t rest, but now I’m not going to work out because I’m so tired. And it just starts to compound. And so that’s in those high stress situations, you know, it’s like, oh, and then I didn’t eat anything for lunch because I wasn’t hungry.
And now I’m starving and it’s bedtime. So now I’ve got to cram a bunch of calories. And I didn’t sleep as well. My cortisol is up. So yeah, it just becomes this yeah, a bit of a compounding factor. But the cortisol spike is the big thing. Oh, gosh. That’s so true, too. And what do we want to reach for when we don’t sleep and when we’re so stressed out? Sugar. Yeah. Right? Sugar. Some folks reach for alcohol, which is, you know, it’s just sugar, alcohols. Yeah. Salt is, yeah, comfort. We’re reaching, you know, we’re really just trying to comfort that voice in our head. And, Yeah. It can lead to unintended, just negative feedback. And so it’s a bit of a complicated answer because each person really handles it differently, but it’s a real thing. And I’ve seen the opposite where this challenge I did, this person came in and they’re like, We’ve been on a cruise for two weeks.
Our results are going to be so bad. We ate whatever we wanted. And like, we were just so relaxed. And so we think, you know, our Numbers aren’t going to be great. They still lost body fat and gained muscle because they were like, you know, their cortisol is probably as low as it had ever been. And so they were like, wow. And I’m like, shouldn’t make a habit of it. Wait, so you’re saying I should quit my job and go cruise the world from here on out? You and me both. We’ll just, I’m going to take off. No stress. Let’s do that. Let’s take that route. Okay, sounds good. Sold. So I think it’s really interesting. Because, and I think like my final question about this, maybe Dr. Fisher has anything else after me here, but I mean, like overall, then who would you say should be like utilizing body composition data meaningfully?
And then how can we use it positively? You know what I’m saying? Like in a way that’s positive versus shameful and discouraging. Yeah, absolutely. So I am biased. So I think this data should be applied broadly and that more primary care physicians should talk about it. I think the damaging thing that we look at and focus on is weight. And I think we’ve seen it over and over. And I don’t fully understand why BMI is still used the way it is. I understand to an extent. But I do think pretty broadly, anybody who’s looking to make a health change or makes a change to their lifestyle, it can be as small as, I quit drinking a Mountain Dew at lunch.
” I’ve seen people lose 15 plus pounds of body fat over a year from just quitting one little habit like that. I think that anybody who’s maybe struggling with the idea of their weight should go get a scan as well and look at their body composition instead because there’s more useful data than body fat. It’s more about like. What is your muscle mass?” and how is your muscle mass impacting your metabolic rate? And that’s the question I usually ask. When people are skeptical to hop on our device, which I totally understand. It can be an intense thing in a vulnerable state. But I say, Have you ever thought about how much muscle mass you have and how that would relate to your metabolic rate? Because both of those pieces of data will show you, this test will show you. And the answer is almost always no.
And cool, let me try this because I’ve never thought about it that way. So I think that that’s really important. I think focusing more. I think everybody on their result sheet has some form of positive to get in the segmental lean. It can be like, wow, you’re really balanced in the way you built your muscle mass. I can’t say that. Like my legs don’t match my upper body. It’s driven me nuts for 13 years now. But I can’t, I’m still, it’s informed my exercise routine to the point where I think it’s just made me healthier overall.
And so I think that’s a bit of a broad answer, but I think anybody who is looking to make that healthy change, who is curious about it, and once your baseline is set, even if you don’t make that healthy change, I think there’s value in seeing if your lifestyle is changing you, or maybe you’re staying the same. It could go both ways. So I think using the data in a positive way is there is no perfect body comp. I hope everyone understands that too. I can’t point to anybody and be like, they’re perfect. You know, there was somebody I think in Japan who lived to like 107. I don’t think they were very perfect in how they, you know, their body comp was that’s a body comp is just piece of the puzzle. We’re not the whole puzzle, but it can be very, very helpful to get out of, I think your own head in terms of is weight going down, weight going up just the weight concept in general. And so instead of thinking about it like, Oh, I gotta lose this. ” Just think about like, This is where I am today. Where do I wanna be in the future?”
You know, you don’t have to change. That’s okay too. But if you want to, we’ll prove if it’s working the way, like what you’re doing is changing you the way you’re hoping. If that makes sense. Mmhmm Yeah, Dr. Fisher and I talked in a previous episode about comparing yourself to others in terms of Your strength, strength improvements and performance in the gym, in terms of the most helpful thing you can do is compare yourself to your previous self and perhaps your intended future self, not to somebody else because it’s not the same input. That’s amazing.
I love that. I’ve never heard it said quite like that, like your future self that way. I like that’s what I try to explain to folks is like this isn’t about today. This is about the future. Like, what do you, want to do? I’m not here to, I think we all know what works. It’s, it’s more about what will work for you and what are you willing to do? And so it’s really just data and you know, like the sleep data, you can take it to a really dark place or you can just use it to inform what you’re currently doing and adapt it if need be.
Will, if we can, just as the last couple of questions, I want to chat to you about inbody specifically, if that’s okay. So I did my undergraduate degree a long time back and in the labs we had hydrostatic densitometry, so we had underwater weighing. So that tells you kind of how old I am. And then in my physiology labs over the last 20 years where I worked, we had BODPOD and we had TINIDI scales. It was really only in the last probably 15 years that we started to use inbody Now, we’ve published a number of papers, you know, I’ve published a number of papers historically with BODPOD, and then a couple of papers were using inbody devices as well. Now, for me personally, BIA has changed quite drastically in the last 20 or so years. It’s become much more reliable, it’s become much more accurate in the measurements that it takes, but it’s so infinitely less invasive. I can remember doing studies and having to take BODPOD measurements or skin caliper measurements blood pod measurements or skin caliper measurements. And you alluded to this earlier. And as if there wasn’t already enough anxiety about getting somebody to be weighed and then measure their body composition, but they effectively have to derobe to do it.
But now of course, with BIA and with InBody, you just step on a scale as you hold the device and so forth. And InBody to me is the highest end of this BIA, because it’s professional grade, it’s medical grade, it’s what you might see in the research publications. Can you give us a bit of a Blurb about the benefits of InBody? I know there’s segmental body mass, and you kind of mentioned that briefly a second ago when you talked about lower body and upper body. So just give us a bit of a background of the qualities of InBody, maybe compared to other BIA devices.
Yeah, absolutely. So our founder is an engineer, and he was looking at BIA devices back in 1995. And it was the original RGB. There was like electrodes that went down one side of your body and you laid on a table and put two on your hand and then two on your foot. It would read one side of your body and then assume the other side was the same. I’ve used those. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say. I can’t believe you used them somewhere. And it was, he was so intrigued. He thought, this is amazing, but I think I can do it better. And so what he did was, uh Pioneer a couple of things. The eight point electrodes competitions caught up to that. I think everyone’s pretty on board with having these eight points of contact. So you do need bare feet to do the test. That’s like the most invasive part. But from there, what he did was introduce multiple frequencies, which basically gave us a much more accurate water measurement. So we could read full body or total body water and then extracellular water, which allowed us to see like extracellular water to total body water ratio, like rough measure of inflammation.
And then the way we A rough measure of inflammation. Uh, and then the way we do it is we measure each segment of the body separately. So each arm, each leg in your torso, and all of that leads to the, there’s no need for empirical estimation. So I can test on our devices myself and then as input myself as a 99 year old female and my results are the same. And it’s because we’re just, we’re truly measuring where, uh, even the bod pod has to make up for a lack of data with estimation. Or, you know, a lack of data with estimation and is it pretty good?
Some could argue, um, underwater weighing is a, uh, considered a gold standard just because of the different densities, but just super not commercially viable. It’s crazy. I’ve did that one too. It’s not fun. Um, but very accurate still. Um, but yeah, what we do is just measure the person for, I always say for better or worse, whatever you want to think, and it’s, it doesn’t matter if you’re at athletic or you’re not athletic or you know, I had a woman come back one time and tell Me, Oh, I’m actually 42. I told you I was 30 and I think, you know, my results were better as a result.
And I told her, Hey, I could put you in as 99. It wouldn’t matter. So you can, you know, rest easy. Those are your results. Um, and that is what makes us unique in the game. Um, involved in, I, I want to say it’s over 8000 studies now, because it used to be, is inbody accurate. And now it’s just like, what can we use inbody for in the clinical setting, because it’s been validated over and over. And now it’s more, you know, how do we find a better dry weight for dialysis patients? How do we encourage GOP1 users to maintain muscle mass? Things like that. Instead of always going back to, like, is this even a valid device? Which, you know, when I started with the company, was a big deal. So things have changed and they will continue to. We’re always looking to be on the forefront of that.
And we actually came out with a grip strength device because we’ve long done the quantity of muscle grip strength actually gives us a little bit better view into like quality. You know, with the exercise coach machines, you guys have a way better view into quality muscle than we do, but in our own way, that was how we wanted to, um, yeah, address that quality muscle issue. So that is, you know, what makes us unique. Um, and I think we’ll keep us around for, you know, the next 25 years as well. Yeah, well, it’s almost like I think about the tests you can take to predict your future health that we measure biomarker tests of our cholesterol and our blood pressure and our weight and our other things, right?
That we just get tested sometimes. In my mind, a body composition should be right up there, if not way up at the top of the tests that one could take to predict their future health and to assess kind of where they’re at. What do you think about that? Oh, I, I so agree. So the devices behind me were for a business here or are for a business in the twin cities where I go around to corporations and just allow people to test on it and then educate them. There’s no nutrition behind it. I give really broad, you know, like water’s good, drink water, don’t drink your soda at lunch, stuff like that. But the whole idea is it’s a different way and a less invasive way. Like blood draws probably shouldn’t be done at the workplace. And then the in body is super non invasive. So it’s, you know, can be argued. And we do work with some of our like large organizations on this. It’s just a matter and kind of like I think the appetite for insurance to reimburse, and I think that’s why we still see a lot of the blood draws, the cholesterol screens, is people are still getting reimbursed from insurance.
But I wholeheartedly agree with you that I think it has come so far since when I started. People didn’t barely know what body comp was when I started, but you know I think it’ll increasingly become more important. And viewed more as like a standard biometric in the future, even more so than it already has. And, you know, we understand it’ll take time, but we’ll definitely be here and we’re happy to help and, like, however we can to, if it’s clinical research or if it’s, you know, working with the American Heart Association, we really try to do it all in this effort to promote body composition as a more standard biometric.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the work you guys are doing. It’s great work and it’s, amazing and at the Exercise Coach Studios, we’re so proud to partner with companies like you because we care a lot about measurement and proving results and data and seeing change and tracking it. And that is something that can motivate somebody to stick with it longterm and see that as a journey and understand their progress and have it be completely interconnected. And available for Interact interconnected and available for celebration and so we love to to prove people’s results in multiple ways. Here’s what’s going on on the inside, you know with the body composition. Here’s what we see your strength is right and then you you experience what you experience on the outside because of this healthy habit that you’re doing and so it’s just one more way to reinforce positive change Which is really at the end of the day, what we’re all after, isn’t it?
And we’re all in it together. And so thank you for your partnership. Thank you for breaking it all down for us. And we really appreciate you being our guest today. Absolutely. Thank y’all for the partnership. And yeah, we’re looking forward to the next 25, 30 years. Excellent. If you heard this episode today and you’re interested in your body composition, of course, you know, at Exercise Coach Studios, It’s included with your membership. Ask your coach about it. It’s so great to take action on this and to find out where you are and to get yourself going on your own journey. Thank you for listening today and we will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverythingcom Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.
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