I just measured myself on the Tanita body composition machine after a 10 day boozing/bucks party holiday.
Before I went on holiday my body fat had been steadily reducing from 21 down to 15 over a few months.
After the boozing, the machine told me I had not gained or lost any weight, but instead lost 5 kilos of muscle… meaning I had replaced it with 5 kilos of fat…
Seems pretty unlikely no???
Is it even possible to lose 5 kilos of muscle in 10 days?
I assume 5 Kg is about 5% of your body weight, considering that that type of instrument has a 4% error, it’s really meaningless. Take multiple reading at different times of day and take the average. I’m still not sure that you will have a reliable reading.
That said, alcohol and partying is very catabolic and it’s likely you would have had significant muscle loss. 5 Kg does seem like a lot though.
Alcohol dehydrates so that’s probably the biggest issue.
Do a search here on Tanita. They’re OK to monitor changes if you always measure under the same conditions but you can’t trust them otherwise.
The other factor could be that alcohol is a diuretic. That would affect the readings.
Wait a couple of days, rehydrate and eat some good food - take the measure again.
Dehydration will give you a higher body fat % reading.
OK, so I got a new reading today…
Now I’m 2kgs heavier in body weight
It’s telling me I’ve gained just 0.2 kgs of fat and the rest of the gain is muscle!!!
I should go on 10 day benders more often!
I agree with all your comments, I should just keep measuring and maybe it’ll become a little more reasonable…
I just can’t help suspect Tanita machines are probably better used as paper weights…
I use an Omron handheld rather than a Tanita. My observed measurements seem to hold within a plus or minus 2.5% range at most, with about a 1% variance being normal.
This is good enough for me because I track daily and use an exponential weighted average with 10% smoothing to calculate the actual number. I found that calipers were more precise but less accurate.
These machines are totally useless crap.
Do you think they can analyze your body composition ?
Bone density ? lean mass ? fats , water… ?
They can’t. They just spit out some info based on statistics.