Aibu about my body fat %

[Onetimeonlyhoildays2026]

Went into boots today and used the weighing machine which also tells you body fat.
I was shocked to find out iam 28% fat

My bmi is 18.6 so apart from lose weight which would mean I'm underweight.

Saying thats isn't bmi crap anyway?
My waist to height ratio is 0.38 which seems ok.

How can I lower my body fat?

Also unless you had a DEXA body composition scan it's not very reliable anyway.

But you sound a bit unhealthy on the approach to weight thing tbh.

Your BMI is only barely avoiding ‘underweight’ by .1 (no judging for that, I’m only 18.8, but I’m very aware that I’m thinner than I’d like to be) and your body fat percentage is perfectly healthy.

You could go to the gym if you liked, but you’d probably need to put on some weight if you’re going to do that or you’ll find it difficult to build muscle instead of becoming unhealthily underweight. Honestly, your attitude towards your body fat percentage seems a little disordered.

28% is fine for a woman in terms of health. I wouldn't call it athletic (most measures would say low 20s for that, professional athletes tend to be high teens) but its not going to cause any problems. I'd call it healthy/average. More importantly though....those machines are mostly bullshit. Honestly. I work in health science. They "work" by sending an electrical current through part of your body (usually limbs, the ones with hands and foot sensors are slightly better than foot only) and approximating the percentage of tissue that is high resistance (fat) then roughly generalizing it to the rest of your body. Its a very rough process with a LOT of assumptions built in - personally, I get unfeasably low readings because my legs are unusually lean. If you want to know your body fat, the methods in order of accuracy are:

1. hydrostatic weighing (nearly impossible to access)
2. DEXA scan (expensive)
3. Callipers by a trained person (at the gym)
4. Eyes of a trained person
5. Tape measure and calculator

And then those scales waaaay down the bottom. But anyway, if you want to improve it, eat at maintenance calories and lift weights. If you've not lifted before you'll get some newbie gains pretty fast.

My concern would be you have low muscle op, if you’re 18.6 bmi with 28 percent fat, this can be very damaging, and lead to osteoporosis, and multiple health conditions,

so the muscle mass number is the most important, also your diet, with a low bmi and low muscle you’d have to have a low cal intake to maintain, so the situation could be worsening, ie are you consuming your protein.

so don’t focus on just body fat also focus on muscle mass and what the over all results are telling you, muscle is absolutely critical for us.

You can try to build more muscle whilst reducing fat by eating enough calories, increasing your protein and doing strength training. As you’re so close to slipping into the underweight category, which can cause health issues, it would be worth speaking to a dietician and a PT for thorough advice on how to do this safely.

With my PT, I managed to reduce my body fat from 27% to 22% whilst staying roughly the same weight with a bmi of 21, so I built muscle and lost fat.

do you have an eating disorder op?

just mentioning as you need a healthy mind before you start worrying about your body shape and size etc.

So if you have issues wirh food and you want to work on something i’d suggest it’s healthy eating first then once you are stable, gym.

when i found out how much fat our bodies are meant to carry i too was horrified but it’s fact. we need fat!

That’s normal, as others have said. Incidentally, your brain (the solid part) is about 60% fat.

Joining a gym and building muscle and stamina is a good idea.

Are you listening to what other posters are telling you?

YOU DON'T NEED TO LOSE FAT.

You are already slim, probably thin. Fat is important - have a read of this:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24052-adipose-tissue-body-fat

A brief except about its role:

Body fat serves many important functions, including:

• Energy storage and release.
• Insulation from cold and heat.
• Cushioning around soft organs.
• Regulating hunger and satiety.
• Maintaining energy balance.
• Regulating glucose and cholesterol.
• Maintaining insulin sensitivity.
• Generating thermogenic heat.
• Contributing to immunity.
• Metabolizing sex hormones.

The average for women is 25-31% so you're bang in the middle.

and further to what biwi says, if you dont eat enough over a long period of time your body starts to cannibalise itself. your heart shrinks, making staying alive more difficult etc. so you dont want to reduce your food intake:

The Process of Organ Shrinkage

1. Energy Scavenging: Once fat stores are depleted, the body starts breaking down protein from tissues, starting with skeletal muscles and eventually targeting organ tissue.
2. Reductive Adaptation: The body downregulates energy-dependent functions to survive, which includes reducing the overall mass of organs to match the lower energy intake.
3. Irreversibility: While some organ shrinkage may be partially reversible with proper nutritional rehabilitation, extreme and long-term starvation can lead to partial, or in some cases, total organ failure.

so listen to what we are suggesting please and by all means eat healthily and go to the gym, but you must eat enough and you must have fat reserves because you need them.

this.

Firstly those machines are very inaccurate when it comes to measuring body fat. Secondly, your body fat is perfectly acceptable. Unless you're a body builder with a higher percent of muscle you're not likely to go much lower than that even if you're skinny. We need fat in our bodies, it's normal.
If you don't like the number, the best way to deal with it is to build muscle. The actual amount of fat in your body isn't likely to go down because at your bmi you likely only have essential fat. But the % will go down if you have more muscle.

It’s fine and healthy. I think it’s actually good as your BMI is at the bottom of the healthy range (still healthy but you don’t want to lose any weight). Women need more fat than men. I think your perception is just off.

Always good to do some weights though! To future proof the body.