If you’ve made one of your new year goals to be healthier, you may feel overwhelmed by all the avenues to explore. Diet, exercise, nutrients, supplements … the list goes on and on. How do you know your health is heading in the right direction?
While weight is generally a good starting point for finding out more about your health, it doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, someone who weighs 200 pounds, but has more muscle mass than fat, is likely healthier than someone else who weighs 175 pounds, but has more fat on their body.
Weight doesn’t give you the whole picture, and is much more complex than ‘less is better’. Sure, a scale tells you how much you weigh, but it doesn’t take into account how much of your body is bone, muscle, and fat.
Instead, there are other ways to find out more about how your body is made up. One great place to start is with a body composition scan.
A body composition scan is performed using minimal x-ray scanning that lasts just a few minutes. The results are immediately available to you and your doctor for analysis.
With an x-ray view of your body, we are able to identify the lean mass, fat mass, and body fat percentage of your body and then divide the results based on regions of your body – your abdomen, hips, torso, and each individual limb. This allows us to measure exactly how much fat is around your organs to assess your risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so you can learn the best ways to prevent a life-altering condition long before it occurs.
There are a ton of benefits to doing a body composition scan, and many are now preferring it to the outdated Body Mass Index method of measuring health.
Your body composition scan will tell you your ratio of fat to muscle, which means you can customize your training regimen and diet to suit your needs. This may mean building more muscle mass, which weighs more than fat. But gaining weight in muscle does not mean you are becoming unhealthier.
Body composition scans do more than measure your health immediately below the skin. They also measure the composition of your bones, and can even indicate what the density of your bones means for your health. For example, someone with osteoporosis is likely to have a lower body density due to how fragile their bones are.
Finally, body composition scans tell us more about risk factors which could influence if you develop a chronic illness further down the road. A body composition scan can find out your risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, along with a host of other illnesses.
To learn more or to book an appointment for a body composition scan, contact us today at (985) 590-5503.
