Does anyone use or have any recommendations for a solid at-home body composition scale? Preferably in the $200 or less range.

I know they won't be as accurate as a DEXA scan, but I'd like something to track body fat, muscle mass, bone density, visceral fat, BMR, etc. and a body map.

I've done some looking around online, and it seems like info is all over the place on which are most accurate or work best, so I have come to you guys....

I have used a Garmin Index scale for a few years and it works just fine. I use Garmin Connect for all the health stuff so it integrates into that for me.

I don't think any are accurate. I have a garmin. It has showed me at 29% even though at a fancy gym where you hold the handles it shows 18% body fat. I plan on buying calipers and you can enter your starting body fat back into garmin. Then it will be close and move with your weight and probably stay within a given range of accuracy . I don't see how any scale less than 4500 dollars is going to show the metrics accurately.

I bought a Hume body pod after being duped by YouTube advertisement. It told me my body fat percent was 13%, and while I'm leaning ish just isn't standard photo references I'm 20-22%. Based on that difference alone I'd pass on the Hume.

Edited to add - I decided to just get a dexa scan at the local sports fitness doc.

I have a renpho, and it's trash tracking anything but body weight. I dropped 23lbs, but have melt all my strength, and it says I've lost only 1%bf.

I've started just taking pictures first thing when I wake up and uploading to chatgpt. It says I was 20% before and now in the 12-13% range. It'll comment on chest separation, striations, etc so I feel it's pretty darn accurate.

I've liked my Withings scale, but it's a cheaper one. They have more advanced ones now. All of these may not be very accurate but as long as they are constant you can track changes.

I've been using a Withings scale and it's good for measuring trends. The numbers won't compare to a Dexa scan though.

I got a scan done recently and my body fat was 15.6%. The Withings would generally show ~7.5% and that's not on the athlete setting.

We use a cheap one by Fit Index we got on Amazon. It's surprisingly accurate and the free app works great. We've had it for about 5 years.

They're all garbage. Keep a scale at home and spring for a quarterly scan.

I don't trust them. It's fun to use, but I can't imagine they're very accurate. I use InBody at my gym. My BF% fluctuates wildly. Just looking back, I went from 17% body fat to 14.5% while also gaining 3 pounds. And I'm positive that wasn't 3 pounds of pure muscle while I also lost fat.

I think over the course of time, if you do a rolling average, and can control for level of body hydration, muscle water, even electrolytes in your blood, you'd get a pretty good trend. But For me it's just too far off to trust for anything other than a vague idea of what may be going on.

Agree with spending on a BodPod analysis, or even DXA once or twice a year. The rest of the time, just use the mirror and a scale.

How do the places with a Dexa scan work? Can you just pay for the scan or do they try to upsell you on their products or services.

Not cheap but my wife bought an InBody scale. The fancy ones at the gym or Dr give the same results, they just track more details. The home one has all you need. Weight, muscle mass and upper/lower allocation, fat and visceral fat, etc.

Thanks for the replies. I figured this was kind of a crap shoot for accurate results. I guess it's good to know I can probably get the same performance out of a $50 one vs spending $200.

BubbaLu said:

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How do the places with a Dexa scan work? Can you just pay for the scan or do they try to upsell you on their products or services.

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Good question, as I'm not sure how it works either, but I would like to get it done.

You can get a DEXA scan at the Huffines Institute for $85 if you're in B/CS. Takes about 30 minutes for the scan and review. They have all sorts of testing available.

https://huffines-institute.tamu.edu/physical-readiness-testing-facility/

Thanks dave99 that helped me figure out what I was looking for. I was searching around San Antonio and the closest places are up in the Austin area. They all looked like medspas. So, a basic scan runs $100-$300 depending on place and add-ons.

I have one of the more advanced Withings scales because I also wanted vascular age / cardio checkup features. Doesn't work at all for that.

I "splurged" for the Garmin scale just to have something that easily syncs to Garmin Connect without having to download third party apps to bridge a connection.

I've been happy with it. I look at the trends for body fat, muscle, etc., but really completely ignore that data. Mainly just use it to weight in every morning after waking up and see weekly, monthly, etc. trends.

Pretty sure most of these are only useful for weight tracking.

I just did a 6 month 23ish pound bulk and InBody said I gained zero muscle mass and 3.5% more body fat in that time period. The math just doesn't math. Seems highly dependent on hydration, time of day, how much food you've eaten recently etc...., need to replicate conditions which is super hard to do.

I have been using the InBody that my gym has. Between early January till today, my weight fluctated as high as 184 and most recently as low as 177. My bf% fluctuated as well, both up and down during this time, as low as 13.6 to as high as 17.3, average during this time was about 15%.

Today, I did it again, but got a DXA scan right after. It said I was at 13.6% bodyfat, at 182 lbs. However, the DXA machine recorded me as 17.7% at 183lbs. I'm sure if I did repeat DXA scans at the same time as this InBody test, I could come up with a correlation between the two. But to me, the mirror and a regular scale is mostly what I need. Calipers might actually be better too - not for calculation of bf%, but just tracking how much I can pinch.