Weight alone doesn't necessarily give a clear indication of good health. See the examples on the left, both men have the same height, same weight and thus same BMI; however, their body composition are totally different. Therefore, it is vital to know about the proportion of Body Fat and Muscle inside your body. Tanita body composition analysers can give you information about your body composition status within 10 seconds.

While monitoring Body Fat % within healthy ranges, increasing the amount of Muscle Mass will help improve your metabolic rate, i.e. allowing you to reduce excess body fat levels and lose weight in a healthy way.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the daily minimum level of energy or calories your body requires when resting, for your respiratory and circulatory organs, neural system, liver, kidneys, and other organs to function effectively.

The BMR is greatly affected by the quantity of muscles you have. Increasing your muscle mass will help increase your BMR, which will increase the number of calories used and then decrease the amount of body fat.

Alternatively, a lower BMR will make it harder to lose body fat and overall weight.

Tanita body composition monitor can automatically calculate your BMR based on your personal data.

To determine roughly how much calories you need in one day to stay in current weight, you need to calculate the Daily Calories Requirement, with your activity level put into consideration.

Daily Calories Requirement = BMR x Activity Level^

Assuming you do 1-3 days per week (Light exercise), the Daily Calories Requirement will be 1,174kcal x 1.375 = 1,614.25kcal, which means in order to stay in current weight, you need to eat at least 1,614.25kcal a day.

Imagine the calories-weight relationship as a balance,

Therefore, if you would like to lose weight, you should eat less than your calories consumption/ Daily Calories Requirement.

However, do not skip meals or drastically reduce your eating portion as in long run, it would affect your metabolism.

Body needs energy/ calories for daily operation; but if the calories intake falls significantly below the consumption level, the body will automatically enter into "Energy Conservation" mode to prepare you for the starvation, i.e. the metabolism will become slower and slower, and instead of burning fat, it will consume energy through dissolving muscle or other organs. As the result, BMR would also drop due to the reduction in muscle mass.

Your body weight may seem dropping at first when you skip the meal; due to lower metabolism, there is higher chance for your body weight to bounce back when you eat back the normal portion of food.