Most of the sheet tells you about your training. This line tells you about your health, and it is the one worth reading first if you only read one. It is also the one people worry about after seeing it, usually more than they need to. Here is what it is and what to do with it.
Fat inside your belly, packed around your liver, intestines and pancreas. It is not the fat you can pinch. That is the other kind, sitting under your skin.
A soft stomach is mostly the fat you can pinch. A hard, round stomach that does not pinch is more often this one.
It behaves differently. Fat under your skin mostly sits there. Fat around your organs is busy: it sends fatty acids and inflammatory signals straight into the blood on its way to your liver. That is why it is tied more closely than the fat you can pinch to blood sugar problems, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, and why two people at the same weight can be in quite different health.
This is also why the scale misses it. You can lose no weight at all and still move this number, and that counts as progress.
This is the case people miss. Someone slim, with a normal weight and a normal body fat percentage, can still carry a lot of fat around their organs. Nothing about it is visible, and a mirror will not tell you.
It is the main argument for reading this line even when everything else on the sheet looks fine.
Sheets report this one of two ways. Some print an area in square centimetres, which is a cross section through your belly. Others print a level, usually on a scale of about 1 to 20. They are the same measurement in different clothes.
The line commonly treated as the point where this starts to matter is 100 cm2, or around level 10 on the sheets that print a level. That figure comes out of research in one population and gets quoted everywhere, so treat it as a rough average rather than a formal guideline.
A number just over the line is not a diagnosis and a number just under it is not a clean bill of health. Nothing changes at 99 and breaks at 101.
Less than the printed decimal suggests. The machine measures how your body resists a small current. It cannot see inside your abdomen, so this figure is worked out from that resistance along with your height, age, sex and shape. The methods that actually measure it are a CT or MRI scan, and nobody is having one of those every month.
So it is a rough estimate of a real thing. Watch your own line over months. Do not read much into a single reading, and do not compare yours to a friend on a different machine.
Your waist tells you a surprising amount of the same story for nothing. Measure around your middle at the belly button, standing, without pulling it tight.
Keeping your waist under half your height is a screening rule used widely because it works across heights and needs no equipment. It is a rough average and not a formal guideline, and it does not separate the two kinds of fat.
Useful as a cross-check between scans. If your waist is coming down, this number almost certainly is too.
Losing fat overall. There is no separate lever for this one. The good news is that it tends to go first: when people start eating in a deficit and moving more, this fat often comes off earlier and faster than the fat under the skin. So the part you cannot see improves before the part you can.
Which is worth knowing when the mirror has not changed yet and you are ready to give up. It may already be working.
Sit-ups, crunches, ab machines and anything sold as targeting belly fat. You cannot choose where fat comes off. Training your abs builds the muscle under the fat and does nothing to the fat on top of it.
Resistance training still helps, just not for that reason. It protects your muscle while you are eating less, which is what keeps the weight you lose from being half muscle.
Fat tends to move inward as people get older, even when weight holds. In women the shift is sharper around menopause, when fat that used to sit on the hips and thighs starts going to the middle instead. The same person, eating and training the same, can watch this number climb.
Worth expecting rather than being blindsided by, and worth mentioning to a doctor rather than treating as a personal failure.
A high reading on its own is a reason to pay attention, not to panic. It is worth a conversation with a doctor if it is high and stays high, if it is climbing while nothing else about you is changing, or if anyone in your family has type 2 diabetes or heart disease.
A blood test answers the question this number only hints at. A few standard ones, for blood sugar and cholesterol, cost little and show what is really going on. Your doctor will know which to ask for.
It is the most useful line on the sheet for your health and one of the least precise. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together is the whole trick with it.
Bodivio reads an InBody sheet from a photo and charts every reading, so you can see the year rather than the day. Every figure it shows says where it came from, the same way this page does.
Have a lookThis explains what the numbers on a body composition sheet mean. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a substitute for talking to a doctor or a dietitian.