Precision via Body Fat Calipers

While I am convinced body fat calipers are more precise, I'm not at all convinced they are necessarily better.

There's much jabbering about the notion that body fat calipers are so much more accurate (precise is a better term) than the more widespread use of an impedence device on a scale. I don't know about either. There's also lots of jabbering about the learning curve of using calipers and being able to find the "correct" and "accurate" body fat measurement.

This seems like a bunch of hooey to me, and I'll lay it out for you.

Here are my body fat measurements for the past week:

23.17%
24.47%
24.81%
24.81%
24.90%
25.15%
24.64%

As you can see, if we remove the low (23.17) and the high (25.15), we are left with a surprising small band (i.e., precision) numbers. 24.47 to 24.90 -- a range of 0.43% body fat. That's pretty impressive. That's the upside. The downside to using boy fat calipers is for what they give you in accuracy, one gives up precious minutes of a morning routine. To take five measurements, then run and dump the data into a web-calculator (see right for link) and then record it somewhere in a spreadsheet -- well, that may take up to 5 mins of my morning, maybe longer, I haven't actually run the stopwatch on it. As opposed to the Tanita scale which spits out a number and I simply write it on the wipeboard in my bathroom (0.2 mins total).

Of course, my Tanita scale seems to measure slightly less body fat (~21%, via moving average) then does the body fat calipers. I would guess the body fat calipers are slightly more accurate, but the difference in my world isn't all that meaningful.

It should be pointed out, that both technologies are quite cheap and easy to implement -- calipers are ~$25 bucks delivered (see posts below) -- while, a Tanita scale used on eBay might be ~$50 (at most I would guess) up to ~$150 range I think. The advantage with the Tanita scale is you'll get more day-to-day measurements, though they will arguably be less precise; of course, with calipers it's likely you'll get fewer measurements but they will arguably be more precise.

So I think my plan will be to, perhaps, take weekly measurements of both circumferences around my body, and weekly body fat measurements via calipers. I see no reason to not continue using the Tanita scale body fat numbers, which contrary to all the yelling, seems to be pretty close to accurate for me at least. YMMV.

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