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Summary
On episode 472 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Mike Fedewa and Dr. Mike Esco, faculty in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Alabama who study body fat and athletic performance and built the Made Health and Fitness app.
Both guests make the case that body fat isn't the enemy people think it is. It stores calories, insulates against cold, cushions organs, and produces hormones the body genuinely needs. The real issue isn't the presence of fat, it's the balance between fat and fat-free mass (muscle and bone), and where on the body that fat tends to be stored.
The conversation covers why BMI is a useful population tool but a poor individual diagnostic, why waiting to lose weight before lifting weights is a mistake after your mid-30s, and how their app estimates body composition from a single photo with accuracy close to underwater weighing and DEXA scans.
Links
- https://mymadeapp.com
Key Takeaways
- Body fat has essential, non-negotiable functions. It stores extra calories for lean times, provides insulation and temperature regulation, cushions vital organs, and generates hormones and cell-signaling molecules the body depends on. Fat is not inert padding, it's physiologically active tissue.
- Fat-free mass matters more than the body fat percentage number. Elite female athletes often carry a similar total amount of fat, in pounds, as non-athletes. The real difference is how much muscle they're carrying, which drives the percentage down. Reframing the goal from “lose fat” to “build and preserve fat-free mass” changes the whole approach.
- Where you store fat changes your health risk. An “android” or apple-shaped pattern, extra fat around the midsection, carries a higher risk for issues like high blood pressure than a “gynoid” or pear-shaped pattern that stores more fat in the hips and thighs.
- BMI is a useful population trend tool but a weak individual diagnostic. It's just a ratio of weight to height, so a lean, muscular athlete can technically land in the “obese” BMI category. For tracking a whole society's health trend over decades it's valuable; for one person's health picture it can be misleading.
- Don't wait to lift weights until after the weight comes off. Sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle and strength, starts working against you every year you delay strength training. Someone over 35 who restricts calories without lifting is missing the chance to reshape the fat-to-muscle ratio while losing weight, not just after.
- Every body composition method trades accuracy for accessibility. DEXA and underwater weighing are the most accurate but require expensive lab equipment and trained technicians. Skinfold calipers require extensive training and still carry high error between testers. Bioimpedance scales are convenient but swing wildly with hydration status.
- Their app estimates body composition from a single photo. After entering height, weight, age, and other basics, one properly posed photo is scanned in about 15 to 20 seconds, and the results have shown near-perfect agreement with underwater weighing and DEXA in their research. Images are analyzed and then deleted, not stored, for privacy.
- Tracking a metric, even loosely, changes behavior by roughly 10 percent. Their research participants who simply monitored steps, calories, sugar, or water intake moved or ate differently just from the act of watching the number, which is why frequent, low-cost tracking (like a phone photo) can catch small wins that infrequent lab tests miss.
- Dr. Esco and Dr. Fedewa's combined strategies to get and stay well: be intentional about building healthy habits rather than expecting them to happen on their own; set goals that go beyond the scale and include performance and other health markers, while accepting that setbacks are part of the process, not evidence of failure; and be patient, since real changes in body composition take time and can't be judged from day-to-day swings.
“Suffice it to say that without fat, we wouldn't be here. There are multiple important physiological purposes for fat.”
Dr. Mike Esco
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Episode 492 – The top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40