Picture this gal: 5-foot-4, slender, funny, cropped white hair — right out of an Eileen Fisher ad. Healthy lifestyle, including macrobiotics, pilates and yoga. Also, fatigue, osteoporosis and heart disease, of the blocked major vessels variety. Her doctors told her she needn’t worry about her weight — but they’re wrong.
We did an electronic body composition analysis using my fancy-dancy machine. (It’s the medical version of those body fat analyzers you see at the gym or in Target.) Guess what? More than 30% body fat on this gal! In women, healthy body fat is around 19%-25%; in men, it’s less. At less than 100 pounds, this gorgeous woman was actually quite obese. That’s sarcopenia — her lean body mass had melted away. You’d have never guessed it just looking at her.
Your body is made up of water, lean mass (muscles, bones, organs) and fat. As you age, especially if you’re sedentary and eat poorly, you’ll lose lean mass because your body will cannibalize muscle to get what it needs. (Gross!) But your lean mass is your metabolically active tissue — your battery pack, the stuff that keeps you from falling down, that lets you grab the bag of groceries or jump up out of the chair. Lose it, and you get tired, you fall, you have trouble doing things that used to be easy. In the elderly, sarcopenia is pretty common. It’s pretty common in young people, too.
Why care, if your weight is okay and you look good in jeans? Because fat is not an inert lump of yellow goo. It’s a hormonal chatterbox, “talking” to the rest of your body in some fairly sinister ways, mostly with the chemical signals of inflammation — Public Enemy No. 1 health-wise. For this gal, the lost muscle mass left her with an abundant fat mass that’s been talking dirty, all day, every day.
So, I don’t want to alarm you but you should know that although you may be just right by scale weight, you may really be fat enough to have a pile of risk factors for the diseases of aging you don’t want. Though people talk bla bla bla about “healthy weight,” appearances can be very deceiving. Find out what your lean and fat percentages are, and stay away from sarcopenia.
Susan Fekety is a Yale-educated advanced practice nurse with special expertise in nutrition and dietary therapies. She provides women’s health care and coordinates the First Line Therapy program at True North Health Center in Falmouth. Contact her at sfekety@truenorthhealthcenter.org.