On Dec 7, 10:28*am, Doug Freyburger wrote:

Unless you really spoil yourself and get a scale that's capable of
Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA). *You can measure your percent
body fat to a reasonable degree of accuracy (I believe most are
accurate to within a tenth of a percent).

Years ago these were notoriously inaccurate. *Has this changed
with the advance of technology? *They used to use electrical
resistance in the feet to estimate body fat percentage. *To the
extent that manages to run a current from leg to leg it still
misses the belly. *I played soccer in high school and to this day
have muscular legs with good definition so my fat is belly and
upper body - How could a scale figure that out?

This is beginning to exit the realm of my knowledge about BIA, but I
believe as long as that assumption is made (ie. by setting the
athletic flag on my particular scale), the equations used
(specifically, to calculate TBW and lean content; fat mass is the
difference between these... %BF = (TBW - lean)/TBW ) can be adjusted
to compensate for it.

But it's all moot to me. I don't have this particular build, so I
believe my BIA to be reasonably accurate (it is consistent with the
BIA measurements I had taken when I wrestled; they introduced
periodic body fat measurements to ensure people weren't losing weight
too fast between matches). And what REALLY matters to me is the
decrease in the values of weight and %BF. I don't really care if I
happen to weigh 3lbs more than my scale is reporting. I care about
the precision (consistency with self) of the scale, because I'm
interested in the change in my body weight/fat. I already know the
value to my desired accuracy: "too much."

Further reading on BIA:

http://florey.biosci.uq.edu.au/BIA/index.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv....section.25999