How fat am I ?

My new Body Fat scale (That is not my weight.  I wish!)

In order to track my progress as I try to lose body fat and get closer to my ideal performance weight I bought a scale that measures body fat.  It does this by sending an electrical signal through your body and measuring the degree of resistance.  The signal travels through fat more quickly.  It is not known for great accuracy, but it gets reasonably close.  But for my purposes, I don't need to know my exact body fat percentage as much as I need a consistent indicator of said body fat, so I can make sure the number is, in fact, getting smaller.

As soon as I got my scale a few days ago I tried it out and it said I weighed 145 lbs. and had 23% body fat. I was fully clothed in the middle of the day.  Yesterday, first thing in the morning, naked, I tried it again.  I wanted a starting point so I could compare consistently under identical conditions.  I had eaten very healthily the previous day and done 90 minutes of total cardio, plus working, plus some weight lifting.  I now, apparently, weighed 140 lbs.  Not bad.  Except that my body fat was still 23%.  And that is exactly why I need a scale like this!  Normally I would get on the scale and be down 5 lbs. and be thrilled.  And yes my clothes would be looser for a day or so.  Until I drank more water or ate a cookie.  But I wouldn't perform better, because the weight I lost was not fat.  Which means it was either muscle or (most likely in this case) water.  Needless to say, muscle and water loss do not help performance.  Since my main goal in losing weight is to be a better triathlete, I want to make sure I am losing fat.

My plan is to implement the information and ideas I learned in the book "Racing Weight" and track both my weight and my performance concurrently.  I will likely check my weight and fat % once a week, just for reference.  But once a month I will check my weight and fat % and perform a standard workout (such as a 6 mile run), and I will keep track of that data for comparison.  As long as my weight, fat, and performance times are all going down, I am on track.  If my weight continues to drop but my performance improvement stalls I will know I am close to the best performance weight for my body.  These workouts will be a concrete yardstick to measure progress, but I will also pay attention to how I feel.  I may get faster in a 6 mile run, but if I feel weak during it or can't do other training because I pushed too hard I will have to pay attention to changes in my weight and body composition and decide if it negatively affected my performance.

So now I have another fun toy...I mean, um, useful tool, to motivate me on my triathlon journey.