Girth measures
Well, this is NOT an easy thing to write about! I know some folks feel very secretive about how much they weigh... that, I've never felt so bad about disclosing. But girth measures... well, that's always been another story. Somehow, those measurements are what makes the GOO real for me. As in "UGH! How can I be THIS big?".
Nevertheless... some form of girth measure is really important for this journey. It's one of my goals to do this monthly. Not a goal I've been meeting often, sigh.
But, if I don't take them, suppose the scale stops moving... how will I know if I've made progress? It's not unusual in the process to see inches lost while the scale stubbornly stays the same. This is because muscle takes up less volume than body fat. So if you add muscle and lose some body fat... your body gets smaller, though it may weigh about the same for a while.
Some folks check measures by seeing how a favorite pair of non-stretch pants fit. If, like me, you mostly wear stretchy stuff anyway, that's not quite as good an indication. So I measure.
I use a MyoTape by Accufitness.
I also do the measurements via the guidelines set by my Precision Nutrition manual. Well, mostly.
The basics are that you do a set of measures, neck, shoulders, upper arm, chest, waist, hips, thigh and calf, note them down, then repeat the process twice more and average the three measures. This helps take some of the hit and miss out of measuring GOO. (Sadly, fat is soft and squishy... and yeah, you can tighten the tape on it more or less by just a little and get inconsistent measures.)
It's hard in some spots keeping the tape parallel to the floor. If you've got a nice lean body, this is much easier... but if you've got folds of fat to hold the tape over... not so fun!
I currently just measure one side of the body when it comes to upper arm, thing and calf... that's indication enough for fat loss. If you want to check muscle development, then you might want to measure both sides. Me, while I'm losing fat, I'm keeping the unpleasantness of body measuring to the bare minimum! Besides, in winter, it's cold standing around in one's undies.
Now, going by the PN system, they like to take the waist measurement at the level of your navel. This definitely gives you a clear mark on your body to go by, but, I don't personally like this... it's too close to the hip measurement and for me, is a really awkward place to measure, so I get a lot of inconsistency there. So I call that my "navel" measurement and do another at my true waistline, which is about 3" higher and where I get a more consistent measure.
I also added in a wrist measurement, when I saw that the first place I clearly noticed a difference was the fit of my Polar F11 HRM.
The hardest places to measure for me are the shoulder, navel and hip measures. I'm just noting that, because that's where you may see more inconsistency in posted measures. Also, as the last time I measured was MONTHS ago, and I'm doing some things differently, as in wearing a different bra while measuring and adding in a true waistline measure, I'm not going to list the previous measurements. That will come in the future.
So here's the scoop. I'm big still.
| Body Part | Averaged Measure |
Previous | Difference |
| Neck | 14.416 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Shoulder | 44.833 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Chest | 46.125 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Bicep | 14.667 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Waist | 44.583 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Navel | 54.875 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Hips | 53.000 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Thigh | 23.167 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Calf | 15.458 inches | n/a | n/a |
| Wrist | 06.500 inches | n/a | n/a |
