Item — HN Reader

"fat and muscular" still means you're fat. Carrying excess fat is indicative of having metabolic syndrome and the many issues associated with that (chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, etc).

(I'm ignoring the fact literal BMI is a poor measure and BF% should be used instead to properly account for the vast variety of body shapes and sizes which have healthy BF% but don't align with the very out-of-date BMI charts & studies.)

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BF% is hard to measure. Different manufacturers use different models to map resistivity data to BF%, so for the same person one can get rather different answers.

Resistance based measurements are pretty poor especially with only 2-4 points of contact, the accurate ones are displacement based like bodypod and X-ray based.

I’m actually surprised that this isn’t something that people have thrown ML at yet, it seems like a problem that an IR camera with 360 degree body imaging and a good model might actually be able to solve.

Agreed, resistance measurements are not great.

At the minimum, you need a friend to use calipers on you, and take those measurements over time to see trending and averages.

Even better is a dunk tank or Dexascan to get actual numbers from direct readings, most cities/universities have such facilities but not as accessible to everyone. In a perfect world it would be part of your annual physical, but they still use BMI charts :(

DXA scans are accurate to within 1% and are now available in most urban areas for about $50.

So about $250 with insurance.

No those aren't generally covered by insurance. You just pay the test company $50.