Transcript
Warning, this is more fitness education than add. If you want to lose fat and gain muscle, the best way to do it is to track your progress and adjust your diet and workouts accordingly. But BMI and body weight are not that helpful because they don't distinguish between fat and muscle. Instead, you need to track body composition, muscle mass, and body fat percentage. You may have heard that body fat analysis scales are inaccurate and useless, but really it's all about which ones you use and how you use them. As a fitness-obsessed scientist, I have measured my body fat with MRI, Dexascan, calipers, of different devices in scales. The latter work by sending an electric current through your body, and because the different bodily tissues conduct electricity differently, they can use various formulas to calculate body fat and muscle percentage. A lot of it is about water content, which is why hydration status can throw some off. As a hypermobile twig with bird bones, I am usually an outlier for all of these methods. But they're still super useful to me. Here's why. Hume, this video's sponsor, uses multiple frequencies of electric current, sent through eight sensors in both hands and feet, to give not just full body fat and muscle measurements, but also segmented breakdowns for each limb. Their published data, comparing with 50 gold standard Dexas scans, shows a 97% correlation for body fat. Me being me, my Dexascan showed 13.8% body fat, while my Hume showed 8.4%. But after doing a 25-hour dry fast where I lost 4 pounds of water weight and then regain them over 4 hours, it only fluctuated between 8.4% and 8.7%. And my morning weigh-ins have been super consistent in the last two months. Hovering between 8.2 and 8. For at-home tracking, precision is way more important than accuracy. This lets you do what I did and use a one-time expensive scan to get your absolute calibration, then convenient daily weigh-ins for tracking your relative progress, both full body and limb-by-lim. This day-to-day consistency is what's really useful for hitting your fitness goals, a data nerds dream, and most other bioimpedance scales vary a whole lot on a day-to-day basis. Check the link in my bio.
Additional notes
#ad #humepartner Use code "DISTILLEDSCIENCE" at checkout for up to 50% off! (Check out the link in my bio) I haven't done this yet, but I definitely plan on using their body-segmental analysis feature (which gives the total muscle mass in each arm, leg, and trunk) and compare it vs tape measure readings on each limb. And then plot vs 1 RM over time :) For a great analysis of different bioimpedance scales and algorithms, check out DOI: 10.1186/s12967-024-05272-x #science
References
- Study title not listed in workbook. DOI: 10.1186/s12967-024-05272-x. Source: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-024-05272-x