I haven’t weighed myself in like a month cuz the digital body fat scale I have at home has finally run out of battery after like 8 years. Mr. W’s old bodyfat scale, which I knew how to operate, went on the fritz and he’s got a new one that I can’t work, so I haven’t been using his scale, either.

When I arrived at Vicky’s apartment yesterday, she was out walking the dog but had told me to go ahead in as the door was open. So I went in her bathroom, and saw that her digital body fat scale, the same model as mine, was out. Of course I had to get on it, curious and nervous after my prior 2 weeks of only going to the gym twice to do cardio. And of course I had to strip from head to toe so as to eliminate any possible excess weight (You think I’m bad? My mom wouldn’t even step on her scale if she was damp from her shower.).

This model of scale had always placed me at approximately 28% body fat, and I had been about 126ish pounds for a long time. When my weight fluctuated down, the body fat would go up, and if my weight went up, my body fat would drop, indicating that if I put on or lost weight, it was muscle. But yesterday, I was at the lowest weight I’d been in a long time, 120.0 lbs. The body fat percentage was 24%. I had never been at a LOW body fat percentage WHILE weighing less, too! At least, not in recent memory.

What I think happened was that with the increased weights my gym trainee and I had been doing before we took a break, my body composition had changed dramatically to put on a lot of muscle which burned off a lot of fat. And with the two weeks of not doing weights but doing a little cardio, my body burned off some of the accumulated muscle but did not put the fat back on due to the elevated metabolism created from the new muscle. So the result is a drop on both ends.

I’m 5 pounds to goal!

(Click here to see a post I’d written last year about what body fat percentage is right for your body type.)