I am afraid to get leaner. Help !

Luzian said:

Yeah, but at some point you'll learn to estimate pretty accurately but looking at pictures. I wouldn't call anyone fat, but I would have estimated the guy in the first link at around 18% and you probably at around 14%. In my experience all the other methods (calipers, bioimpedance, etc.) all are resulting in numbers that are too low.

I agree with you, it is just so difficult, over the internet, to know if the person who's expressing an opinion is as good as you are in judging pictures. The only thing I wanted to point out is that many times you see forums and blogs in which people throw numbers around without being accurate...

By the way, just to confirm what you say about biompedance, my beloved Omron HBF-514C scale had me at 13% (when properly used, that is measuring in the morning just out of bed before drinking or eating anything). Still a great tool for $65...

Luzian said:

There's certainly a variance in proportions that makes one person appear leaner at 12% than another person at 10%. But I have never seen anyone at 20% that looks lean. Do you care to share a picture? Not because I'm looking to judge you, but it would be interesting.

I don't have a picture handy but I'm similar to the guy in the link provided by Giovanni. Not that I look like that guy but my bodyfat level looks to be similar to his.

I see. I would call that healthy, average and perfectly fine. But not lean.

By the way, about the unforgivingness of a DEXA scan: when I got my first scan, the very first thing I did back home was trying to find some evidence that DEXA is not accurate But unfortunately it is.

In my area you can now get a DEXA scan for $55 and you get a lot of information out of it while taking literally a few minutes. I did it to get some solid info of where I stand after a substantial weight loss. The result was that I came a long way but I still some have work to do :-)

Also it did gave me some good reference versus my scale, that I now use to see the trend.