I didn’t get an accurate reading either, but I was eating a chicken leg at the time.
I linked to that earlier in the thread.
My apologies.
Please consider my post withdrawn.
I was about 175 14% in that photo. It was taken almost 4 years ago.
I was involved with the U of Chicago on sports med study and we found those devices to be very unaccurate. The issue was some people were spot on and others were off as much as 18%. That’s a HUGE gap.
We had to get body fat measured the real way in a dunking tank.
But the one really odd quirk, that makes those tools very good, is while the inital number is not accurate, if you increase or decrease your fat that difference IS accurate.
For instance, I was 10% body fat but measure at 14%. At my lowest I got to 7% and the device used (the same one the OP described) went down to 11%) and the numbers followed me. This was also true for scales that measure body fat. While the inital numbers were off, the increase and/or decreses matched, whenever I’d go up or down.
So while I wouldn’t take the original number as gospel the change should be accurate. Note, some people, for whatever reason DID measure correctly with the machines and the dunk tank.
BMI is used as a rough tool for estimating how fat someone is because it’s easy. It’s not particularly accurate for anyone who deviates from the assumed norm. Various studies have found it’s not a reliable measure for men, the elderly, people of moderate weights, etc. Since there are so many exceptions, I’d consider it pretty much useless except for outliers at either end of the scale.
I’m in pretty good shape right now, with body fat somewhere between 9 and 11% as measured with calipers, which corresponds pretty well with various body calculators that use things like waist, hip, wrist and neck measurements. My BMI is 24.8, putting me just a hair under the “overweight” category. I do weightlifting and other exercises, so obviously I’ve got a good bit of muscle, though I wouldn’t say I’m huge by any measure.
Electric impedance scales don’t work well. I have a Tanita scale that I got a few years ago. The scale part works just fine, it’s probably no more than 100–200 g off compared to a medical-grade scale. The body fat measurement has never corresponded to reality. I went from about 87–88 kg when I first started using it to 76 kg at present. The body fat measurements it indicates fluctuate all over the place. It’s never read lower than 21% that I can remember, and it said that I was over 26% when I first used it. Yes, it reads lower than before, but that number fluctuates by a few percent depending on the day, and it should read at least 10% lower than my first measurement if it registered even relative change properly.
When my wife (154 cm, 48 kg, dancer) used that scale, it told her that she had almost 30% body fat. You’d have to be blind to believe it because if I posted her picture here she’d be told that she needs to eat a couple of sandwiches. She got upset until I pointed out how inaccurate it is for me. It still bothers her, so she steps off the thing before it starts calculating. I guess she doesn’t like to see the numbers even though she knows she should ignore them except for entertainment purposes.
No problem there. I’ve been lifting weights off and on for 20 years. My problem has been too many offs and not enough ons, not lack of knowledge. I know my way around a gym.