Seems like it should be simple enough but I visited my doctor today and they said “well we can give you your BMI with your height and weight” which is pretty useless imo because it doesn’t account for how much fat vs how much muscle you have. I’m 5’8 220 with some muscle so they would just say I’m obese.
I bought calipers once but they were useless.
I found a women’s breast cancer imaging center near me that lets me come on Friday’s and play with their DEXA scan machine. Used to be $50, now it’s $80, but still worth it. I’d never waste my time stepping onto an impedance machine, let alone buying one.
Cool wish I could do the same.
Autopsy remains the only reliable method. Everything else contains margin of error.
I love you.
Maybe you can. At one point I wished I could. Then I googled some places and made some calls…
Yeah I’ll do that. Seems like body fat percentage should be pretty important, even more important than you getting on a scale so I’m not sure the scale was still there but they couldn’t test my body fat percentage other than useless bmi. I swear doctors used to have at least calipers. Everything has to be difficult these days.
Honestly it doesn’t really hold that much importance.
Callipers can be hand to just measure your sum of skinfold. If that goes down then your bf% will have decreased. As long as it’s always the same person measuring in the same spots that will reduce the user error also.
I’m assuming you just want a low body fat percentage right?
I’m pretty lean all the time, I can see all my abs, my obliques and have good arm vascularity. I’ve not checked my bf% in years. If people said it was 8 or 10 or 12 or 16 it wouldn’t matter.
If you read through these forums you’ll see tonnes of opinions etc however I’ll give you the summary.
Essentially all the experienced bodybuilders/strongmen/powerlifters and recreational lifters on this site will tell you that the number is irrelevant. If you want to have less fat then lose weight, if you want to build muscle then gain weight slowly.
That’s the secret sauce.
Accuracy is difficult.
Unless you’re built like an absolute tank, it’s very likely you are obese.
Please post pictures OP. Show these bully’s you ARE a tank
No I am overweight/ borderline obese. I’ve seen people my weight look like a whale. I don’t look like that, but I’m not skinny either.
I’ve had people tell me I look 190ish, and not just my mom!
Ok fine it’s fair to say I’m obese. I have the fattest head on earth. Just want to know what the percentage is and if I’ve made any progress because I had less muscle than this even 4 months ago. I need help on nutrition.
At least I’m trying. I would bet 99.9% of people that went through what I’ve went through would have given up. Prostate cancer, diabetes and serious mental health issue at one point.
I’ve been able to reduce my AIC to pre-diabetes level when it started as full diabetes level, by .5% from 6.7% to 6.2%.
Awesome work mate, and yes, 99% of people can’t be bothered to get off the couch in perfect conditions, let alone with any sort of problems that might set then back.
I’ve been where you are in terms of ‘just wanting to know’ how much muscle/progress you’ve made etc.
The best advice I can give you is to keep a log on here. Record your training. Your weight. Your diet.
Keep a list of goals and tick them off.
For nutrition, there’s an article on here called the simple diet for athletes.
I strongly suggest giving it a go and getting used to eating the foods on the list and omitting those not on the list, once you’ve made it a habbit macros are easy (there are many many free calculators out there and plenty of threads dedicated to it on here)
This is the reason I get them. I take pictures and stuff to compare, but it’s still hard unless you’re looking at long time spans or maybe I’m a slow gainer lol.
It’s nice because I can see WHAT I added or lost. And where.
What state do you reside in? If that’s too much personal information, disregard!
Texas
Looks like only Dallas Austin Houston has them. I’m in Lubbock not within 6 hours of any.
I just googled “dexa scan Texas” and found tons of places that mention they do dexa scans. If it’s something you’d like, just call around. Doesn’t just have to be a fitness place.
