Body Composition/Metabolism "Reader"?!?

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Tandi_S
Tandi_S Posts: 439 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Happy monday my MFpals! I have the opportunity to do a metabolism scan with a "health food" store that came to do their spiel at my workplace. They have a machine that takes "current readings" at several places on the body and determines lean body mass, RMR and other things...so they claim. Anyone else seen or heard of this? They "claim" that it is the next best thing to the dunk tank as far as body composition.

In further research, neither of these women are certified nutritionists and in their flyer they claim that this measurement machine is "magic." The next few statements explain that they were joking with this statement, but I'm suspicious of quackery at this point...and of course they'd love it if you bought one of their smoothies.

I'd love a window into my metabolism, but if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and sort of sounds like a duck.....

Any thoughts?

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  • Azdak
    Azdak Posts: 8,281 Member
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    The "machine" will give you an estimated body fat %. It's a little hard to tell if this is some new gadget or just a garden variety bioimpedance scale. It sounds like the latter. Some types of bioimpedance scales will provide a more elaborate printout that lists, in addition to body fat, the other types of information you described.

    With the exception of the body fat reading (which is subject to the standard of error inherent in that type of measurement), the rest of it is just a guess.

    If you determine (estimate) body fat %, then simple arithmetic can give you an estimate of fat free mass (right? Just multiply your weight by body fat % to get your total fat pounds, then subtract fat pounds from total body weight to get fat free mass. The problem is that you don't know how much of that "fat free mass" is muscle, how much bone, organs, etc. So any "metabolism" numbers are just general estimates--not much different than calculations on MFP.

    The only way to truly get a "window into your metabolism" is to do metabolic testing. And that requires hooking up to a machine that analyzes both inspired oxygen and expired CO2.

    And, in my experience, resting metabolism measurements like that, while interesting, usually don't add much new information. The fact is that most people have a pretty average metabolism and their measured values do not differ dramatically from values calculated by the standard equations.

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