Biometric Scans: Keeping track of your Body Fat
If you’ve ever started a weight loss plan and been frustrated with the scale, this post is for you!
You know the feeling… You spend all week eating perfectly on plan, maybe you’re working hard at the gym and then weight-in day rolls around. You step on the scale, excited to see all the progress you’ve made and then you look down and see NO CHANGE. Or worse, maybe your weight went up! Suddenly, those donuts in the lunch room or happy hour drinks that you skipped seem a lot more appealing.
The truth is, that even if the scale doesn’t budge, things are still happening in our bodies! If you’re new to weight training, there’s a good chance that you’ve put on muscle and lost body fat, and the net difference with your weight is zero. It could also be a matter of being close to your time of the month or your salt and water consumption over the week, causing you to retain water. These are both perfectly reasonable explanations, but how do we know that’s the case for sure?
One way to get further insight into what’s actually happening in your body is to do a biometric impedance analysis (BIA). BIA is a method of measuring body composition, in which an electric current is sent through your limbs and the rate at which the current travels is compared to similar others in the population (empirical data). This determines what your body is composed of – lean mass, fat mass and water. This can really help us gain insight into what’s happening if the scale doesn’t move, and prevent you from getting frustrated and abandoning the plan when this happens.
At Bronte Wellness Boutique, our BIA is the InBody 270. This machine is particularly accurate because it does not use any empirical data to compare to others in the population when estimating your body composition, it strictly uses impedance. This is a wonderful tool as it’s a quick and accurate measurement, and provides an easy-to-read breakdown of the values we are interested in, and records your progress over time.
If you’re tired of guessing why the scale is up, you feel different but aren’t seeing the scale move, or you just want to know more about what you’re made of, book your InBody Scan at Bronte Wellness today!
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References
1. McLester CN, Nickerson BS, Kliszczewicz BM, McLester JR. Reliability and Agreement of Various InBody Body Composition Analyzers as Compared to Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry in Healthy Men and Women. J Clin Densitom. 2020 Jul-Sep;23(3):443-450. doi: 10.1016/j.jocd.2018.10.008. Epub 2018 Nov 3. PMID: 30472111.
2. Achamrah N, Colange G, Delay J, Rimbert A, Folope V, Petit A, Grigioni S, Déchelotte P, Coëffier M. Comparison of body composition assessment by DXA and BIA according to the body mass index: A retrospective study on 3655 measures. PLoS One. 2018 Jul 12;13(7):e0200465. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200465. PMID: 30001381; PMCID: PMC6042744.