Quote:
Originally Posted by iL1keTurtles
This. I think there's some simple stuff you can do like drink a lot of water before the scan and it throws it off significantly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by madlex
OK, I'll rephrase my question. If I am 135 lbs now with 14 lbs of fat = 10.4% body fat, will adding 8 pounds of water make me have 14/143 = 9.8% body fat on the dexa scan?
Yes, this is exactly how it works, and I forgot to write about this in my original reply as an absolutely angle-able factor.
DEXA scans measure only 2 things:
1) skeletal weight,
2) fat
>> Everything else: muscle tissue, organs, stomach contents, etc just get lumped together essentially as being NOT one of the above 2 things, and often referred to as LBM (lean body mass), but that's a bit misleading since all the DEXA machine knows is that it's not bone or fat. (There's no way to get an accurate accounting of actual
muscle tissue other than a full body biopsy (said tongue in cheek by my dexa tech friend), and yeah: good luck with that as a living human being.) For integrity of bet, parties should have insisted on doing it upon first waking up before any food/drink or the like.