thatdog Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 You know those scales that are supposed to be able to measure not just weight but bmi, body fat % etcetc. I'm asking cos I got a rude wake up last week. When I first started my diet at the beginning of the year I looked online for calculators and stuff to figure out my diet. I calculated that I had a BF% of 37 and daily calorie maintenance intake if 3600 and needed to drop that below 3000 to seriously start dieting. This seemed to make sense cos at the time i was eating heaps of crap, fast food every day, probably about 1.5l of coke per day etc. I went hardcore with the diet, cut out all the crap and quickly started losing weight. last week I checked again and had dropped to 30%bf. It felt pretty good . then 2 days later I'm at the gym and see one of these scales and decide to try it out. the bloody things tells me i have 36.5%bf and maintenance intake of 2165. So which one should I be believing? how accurate are these things and why would it be giving me such a different answer to my other calculations (especially since my pre diet intake was much closer matched to my calcs and I imagine if i was really eating that much over my maintenance I would've been gaining about 2kg a week! If someone could answer this and lmk what's going on here it would really help. this blast combined with my current plaeau has really got my motivation flagging.... Link to post Share on other sites
tman666 Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 Those scales measure electrical impedance to come up with an estimate of your body fat. They are not very accurate. Use the mirror and periodic (every month or so) photos to gauge whether you're losing fat or not. Scales can be very misleading, and should be used sparingly. Link to post Share on other sites
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