DEXA 2.0: What Gets Measured Gets Managed!

What gets measured gets managed! I had the pleasure of going on a field trip recently to visit my pals at Custom Fit for a DEXA scan. Why? Because I love data and this machine is the gold standard in terms of knowing your muscle mass and body fat distribution, bone density, visceral fat surrounding your organs and resting metabolic rate. My last scan was in 2017 and I wanted to see how my health markers had changed.

With the awesome increase in awareness of these tests thanks to Peter Attia’s book Outlive and Netflix’s You Are What Your Eat experiment, many of the DEXA providers have long wait times to get seen, but Custom Fit got me in quickly and easily. And most importantly, I got 1/1 time with my technician Evan to review and understand my results in detail. I’m sharing my results here (PDF) so you can see how much valuable information the scan provides.

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty proud of myself. At 44 years old I have low body fat, a solid amount of muscle, am well balanced in my arms and legs (didn’t used to be, more on that below), have great bone density and a safe visceral fat level. The machine also said I’m extremely pretty and very funny. But we knew that!

Looking at this data over time can be super motivating. Back in 2017 when I had my last scan I had a pretty large muscle mass discrepancy in my legs (left had 22.6# and right had 23.9#). More than 1# is a substantial difference. Back then I lacked mobility in my ankle that caused a shift when I did big lifts like back squats and deadlifts. So I began the long process of adding mobility and prioritizing single leg moves (lunges, split squats, step ups, etc) to balance out the strength and muscle mass discrepancy. So it was really cool to see in my latest scan years later that my legs are balanced with a solid gain in overall muscle (left has 27.4# and right has 27.7#). Woot woot! I attribute a lot of this progress to doing weekly variations of the bulgarian split squat. This is a fantastic move that works on ankle mobility, single leg strength and muscle development and power (a must for runners!). Here are a few of my favorite variations.

Thanks to Evan and his team for helping me make and track gains! Highly recommend Custom Fit if you are looking for body comp and other important health metrics to inform your workouts and nutrition program.