With the improvement of people life level, many people meet the obesity problem. So more and more people join the army of dieters blindly.  However, in actual, not all people know whether they are fitness or not.

Recently, a new word —body fat percentage— comes into people’s eyes. A person’s body fat percentage is the total weight of the person’s fat. The people’s fat can be divided by person’s weight which consists of essential body fat and storage body fat.

Essential body fat is necessary to maintain life and reproductive functions. Due to the demands of childbearing and other hormonal functions, the percentage of essential body fat for women is greater than that for men. Essential fat is 8-12% in women, and 1-3% in men.

Storage body fat is composed of fat accumulation in adipose tissue. Part of the strong body fat protects internal organs in the chest and abdomen. The minimum recommended total body fat percentage exceeds the essential fat percentage value reported above.

Now, plenty of online tools are available for calculating estimated body fat percentage. But those may be not exact. A new home medical equipment called body fat monitor launches. Body fat monitor is a widely available tool used to measure the percentage of fat in the human body. Different monitor use different methods to determine the body fat to weight ratio. They trend to under-read body fat percentage.

Compared to the clinical tools, one relatively inexpensive type of body fat monitor uses the principle of bioelectrical impedance analysis to determine an individual’s body fat percentage.

Body fat monitor can pass a harmless small electric current through the body and measure the resistance. And then it uses the information of the person’s age, sex, weight and height to calculate an approximate value for person’s body fat percentage. The result will fluctuate several percent depending on what one has eaten and how much water one has consumed prior to the analysis.