During the week, body fat scans were discussed in case any of you may consider them in the future. It was seen that testing too often may cause more harm than good.

Here's the other half of that conversation. Yes, those scans give you a body fat percentage. But if that's the only number you care about, you're missing the bigger picture entirely.

So here's the take on body scans imo:

​Being Lean Doesn't Tell the Whole Story Everyone seems obsessed with getting shredded right now. And I know what you're thinking, it's easy for those who are lean to say.

But I've been on the far end of that spectrum, chasing a look obsessively and getting leaner than I should have been. It isn't fun. Your energy suffers, your training suffers, your recovery suffers, and coming back from it is a lot harder than getting there was.

Being lean at any cost is not the flex people think it is.

Two Numbers That Deserve Equal Attention If body fat percentage is the only thing you're tracking, you're ignoring metrics that matter more for how you age and, honestly, for how you actually look.

FFMI, or fat free mass index, takes the tissue on your body that isn't fat and scales it to your height.

Here's why it matters. Body fat percentage is a ratio, so it moves when your fat changes and it moves when your muscle changes. Your percentage could go up without you gaining a pound of fat, simply because you lost muscle.

Or it could go down while you were losing muscle right alongside the fat, which looks like a win on paper but isn't the outcome you wanted.

The percentage alone can't tell you which happened; FFMI can. And the lean, athletic look people are actually chasing comes from having muscle underneath, not from simply being smaller.

Bone density is the one almost nobody thinks about until it's a problem, and it's where the leanness obsession really costs you. Chronically underfueling drops the hormones that protect bone.

In women, that often shows up as an irregular or missing cycle, which means bone is being affected too. That loss isn't always fully recoverable.

The good news is that heavy resistance training builds both. Bone adapts to force. Give it enough load and enough fuel, and it responds.

The Real Point You don't want to be lean at the cost of being fragile. A low body fat percentage on a body without much muscle or bone behind it isn't a win, it's a liability you'll feel in twenty years.

Give your FFMI and your bone density the same attention you've been giving your body fat percentage. Same scan gives you the numbers, so there's no reason to only look at one.