The weight that you lose when dieting is always a combination of fat and lean tissue (i.e. muscle). If you make subtle changes in your eating habits and get plenty of exercise, it's likely that a greater percentage of your loss will be from excess fat. However, if you diet too rapidly, a larger portion of your loss will come from lost muscle.
Not only is muscle important to your body for controlling movement, but it's also metabolically more active than fat. As you lose muscle tissue, your metabolism slows down, making fat loss more difficult. And if you return to your previous eating habits, you'll gain back that excess fat even faster than before.
Your bathroom scale can't tell the difference between lost fat and lost muscle, but the Accu-Measure can. By measuring your fat loss rather than just your weight loss, you'll have the feedback you need to keep your diet on track.
Electrical impedance testing is an easy test to perform, but requires equipment that is more expensive and sophisticated than other testing methods. In addition, many variables, including differences in the hydration level of your skin, can adversely effect this test's accuracy and reliability.
Skinfold measurement methods correlate well with underwater weighing, and use much more convenient tools. The only drawback to skinfold measurement used to be that it took a reasonably skilled practitioner to perform this test. Accu-Measure overcame this challenge by developing a simpler, single-site measurement technique, and by creating a set of calipers that automatically applies the correct amount of pressure to the measurement area.
Independent testing of the Accu-Measure in a clinical study published by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research reported that:
