Body Fat Measuring with a DXA (DEXA) Scan

About a year ago I got a body fat test using a DEXA scan machine. I was able to get very accurate measurements and It helped me looked for other cheaper but just as accurate way to measure body fat. Check out my post on tracking progress to find out the methods that I currently use.

DXA scans are used primarily to evaluate bone mineral density. DXA scans can also be used to measure total body composition and fat content with a high degree of accuracy comparable to hydrostatic weighing with a few important caveats.

In the first picture below you can see one of the scans that shows my bones in blue, muscle in red and fat in orange. It is easy to tell that most of my body fat is in my mid-section. This comes at no surprise since, my legs and arms have always been pretty lean and most men have a predisposition to store fat in the mid-section easily and it is hard to get rid of once is there. The body fat result shown here is about 22% (I am currently around 13%).

In the second picture you can see my bone structure and a little bit of my muscles and fat.

During this time, the doctor calculated my maintenance calories to be 1,830 a day. It was close, but now I know that it is actually 2,600 calories a day on a low-carb diet.