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*Measuring your NECK:
Measure at the narrowest point with the tape sloping slightly downward to the front.

*Measuring your WAIST:
Measure the distance around your natural waist which is located just above your navel.

*Measuring your HIPS:
Measure at the widest point.

*Measure your height without shoes

If you are 150 pounds and have a body fat percentage of 10%, it means that your body consists of 15 pounds of fat and 135 pounds of lean body mass (bone, muscle, organ tissue, blood and everything else).

Knowing your body fat percentage can help you determine if your weight loss goals are realistic. When you decide that you need to "lose weight" remember that your body "weight" consists of both lean body mass and body fat.  Weight loss doesn't always mean just fat loss and it's your muscle mass that burns calories. You want to keep muscle and just lose the fat.  The best way to do that is to do strength training exercises and eat healthy, nutritionally dense food.

A certain amount of fat is essential to bodily functions. Fat regulates your body temperature, cushions and insulates your organs and tissues and is the main form of your body's energy storage.

This tape-measure test is a fair estimate of your percent body fat when measurements are taken accurately-- so if a man got a result of 17 percent from this test, he could expect his true percent body fat to be anywhere between 15 and 19 percent. However, using this method, very fit people can get numbers 3 to 5 percent higher than their true body fat because they don't have a lot of fat inside their muscles. Conversely, if a person is skinny but NOT fit, this body fat test may yield a number 3 to 5 percent lower than their true percent body fat. Though they look thin, unfit skinny people really have more than the usual amount of fat inside their muscles, which you can't see or measure from the outside.

So, please just use this as a general guideline and try to keep your weight loss goals realistic. Remember, keep the calorie-burning muscle, and lose only the fat.

Health calculators and other tools do not provide medical advice nor do they replace the advice of a medical professional. No guarantee is made that the results calculated are completely accurate. This tool uses professionally accepted and peer reviewed algorithms to calculate the results.