Dexa Scan

I had my first Dexa Scan this morning and it was interesting and showed I have a lot of work to do strength training-wise!

My weight was 171.8 (includes clothes).

Total body fat was 65.1 lbs or 37.9%, which he said should be more like 31-35% for my age. My biggest fat concentrations were my stomach, arms, and trunk. Lowest concentrations were my legs and hips, supporting my belief that I've always been shaped like a potato on toothpicks...

My stomach fat to hip fat ratio is still in the unhealthy range (stomach fat should be less than hip fat. Mine are 46% and 36.1% respectively) as is my amount of visceral fat.

Lean tissue (muscle and organs) was 100.8 lbs.

Bone mineral content was 5.9 lbs which is above average for my age.

Interesting factoid, he could tell by my scan that I was left handed because of the lean muscle mass in my left arm/leg vs. right.

They estimate your Resting Metabolic Rate based on these stats. Mine if I was laying in bed all day would be 1367 calories. He said I could eat another 250 calories if I had normal activity, more with higher activity. So I potentially have a lot of calorie increasing to do over the next few weeks/months. (I'll go by the scale in this respect rather than blindly increase though)

I'm happy to have a baseline picture to help with figuring out how much more weight I might want to lose versus muscle to put on. I really don't care about the number on the scale anymore, but would like to have a better balance of fat to muscle.

I will add that I find the way my excess skin/fat pooled around me in the scan picture below particularly unattractive (arms and midsection). And I wonder how much plastic surgery would change these numbers considering the areas I really need done the most (belly and arms) would probably have a lot of fat removed along with the skin? Regardless, I've got some muscle building to do.

I had my first Dexa Scan with Body Spec too. Which reminds me, I bought the package of 2, so I should schedule the second. Are you in Los Angeles???

I'm in Irvine, but they take their trucks all over!

Gothca! Yea, I did mine at my gym!

That's pretty great, I'm so jealous! I would love to do something like this but haven't found a place yet. This is great data to go on, cool!

Come down to DC where all the cool kids are :D

Peachpie had it done in Philadelphia in case that's dowble for you. She said in her post she Googled Dexa Scan Philadelphia...

It actually could be. I'm a few hours away but sometimes go there for work!

I am a huge fan of getting dexascans I have found them very valuable in my journey. Face it when you have been morbidly obese for so long how the hell fo you know what?s really going on?

The basing your resting metabolic rate on your lean body mass is a calculator you can find online. While it is more accurate that a calculation based on weight, still not the mist accurate. Most places that do dexascans also do metabolism testing. When you are at goal or close to it, you might find it helpful. I didn?t really find it changed anything during weight loss but in maintenance it helped me see I could add more calories.

edit: In PS you don't always have fat removed. If you've lost the weight it may be all skin. Which BTW doesn't weigh a lot. Going into my LBL it looked like I still needed to lose 30-40 lbs. he removed 4.5lbs skin. No fat. If it wasn't for my first dexa I wouldn't have realized I was ready for PS.

I tried a bunch of the online RMR calculators after reading this. They varied quite a bit (from about 1150-1350 calories more or less). That is the same range that they gave me when I had an RMR test, so I guess maybe I shouldn?t have paid for it! Thankfully it wasn?t much (was packaged with the Dexa). I have found from tracking that an average of 1250 calories seems to be my maintenance number (so right in the middle of the range).

Edited because I just realized that my true calories are probably more like 1350 (I don't track my calcium chews, coffee and the extra couple of bites of cottage cheese I have when making breakfast and lunch).