🦴 I Got A DEXA Scan

In this week's P.O. Box:

Finding out my body fat
Offszn Book Club: March selections
On my radar: Killers of the Flower Moon
On tap: DFS After Dark & the return of Best Ball Breakfast

When it comes to health and fitness stuff, I’ve never been a big “tracking” guy.

I’ve never counted calories or cared how many steps I’ve taken in a day.

This approach has its pros and cons.

I find “listening to my body” to be pretty effective on most fronts (mainly because I’ve built up a lot of entrenched habits over the years), but it also makes it hard to optimize for a specific result when you are essentially just vibing.

Because of this, I feel like I’ve been in maintenance mode for a long time. I’m really good at showing up, putting in the work, optimizing for momentum, etc., but I haven’t tried to accomplish anything specific in awhile.

I still don’t have an exact goal in mind, but I thought one way to get the motivational ball rolling would be to get a DEXA scan (an imaging test that measures a variety of things like your bone density and body composition) and an RMR (resting metabolic rate) test.

I had been meaning to do some testing like this for a long time and was recently reminded of it after reading about Shaun Deeb’s million dollar prop bet with Bill Perkins to drop from over 40% body fat to under 17%.

In addition to being curious, I figured getting a baseline for my overall body composition numbers could provide me some extra motivation to dial in my health habits even more this year.

Anyways, on Tuesday I went to an office space in Brookline, MA for an hour, got scanned, and breathed into some tubes. Here are the results…

I clocked in at 15% body fat at 195 lbs.:

I assume at least 1% of that body fat had to be directly tied to eating my body weight in In-N-Out the other week.

Apparently I have very good bone density:

Suck it osteoporosis

And my REE (resting energy expenditure) is 2074, which means I burn 2,074 calories per day in a resting state.

You know the results are legit when they look like they were printed from the first ever computer

Another chart I received estimated my total calorie expenditure (REE + Lifestyle/Activity + Exercise) at 2911 calories per day, which I suppose would be a helpful number to know if you were trying to dial in a specific diet for weight loss or bulk.

I received a bunch of other charts, but I’ll spare you those (DM for android/gynoid ~~chart~~ pics).

I plan to poke around a bit more and see if there’s anything else interesting or actionable with these numbers, so if any of you guys have expertise in these areas or know things to look for, let me know.

I just thought it would be fun to have these numbers, use it as a carrot to up my game, and then test again in a year or something—similar to my ongoing stretch experiment (I’ve still been going once a week since taking the initial test).

Or maybe I can get Bill Perkins to give me a milly if I can get down to 10%…

Ok, lots of ground to cover in this week’s Book Club update. We got one February book completed, one ongoing, and the announcement for March selections so you have a little extra time to track them down…

Book #2 (COMPLETE): Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Very glad we kicked things off with this book, which fully delivered on the hype. The more I think about it, the more I’m impressed with how he was able to balance a gripping narrative with all of the other macro points he wanted to make about the prison system, criminality, race/class, and bloodsport.

Most discourse around these topics typically is reduced into black-and-white hot takes, but Adjei-Brenyah successfully humanizes these complex characters in a way that forces the reader to appreciate the nuance of their situation.

It’s tough to walk away from this one without wanting to practice more forgiveness and grace.

Book #3 for February (35% Done): Gambler Secrets from a Life at Risk by Billy Walters

I’m finally rolling on this book. The first third of it, which is essentially just a biography of his early life, is truly wild. It feels like a miracle that Walters was ever able to have any success whatsoever with how crippling his early gambling and drinking vices were. It’s also stunning that his wife Susan stuck with him through all of that bullshit, but she must have understood that his hustle and ingenuity would eventually win out.

Book #4 for March (Non-Fiction): The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

Multiple people recommended Larson’s work in the initial suggestion form, so I wanted to check it out. This sounds fun:

Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that 'The Devil in the White City' is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor.

Book #5 for March (Fiction): Recursion by Blake Crouch

I read Black Matter by Crouch a couple years ago and enjoyed it and then two of you recommended his follow up, Recursion. Based on the reviews, this sci-fi thriller will be a fun one to discuss:

Memory makes reality…That's what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.

Book #1 (COMPLETE): Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parris

You didn’t miss anything this week.

I’ve devoured almost everything David Grann has written, so I was very excited to finally watch the film adaptation of Killers Of The Flower Moon, even if it legitimately took us five nights to finish it.

I’m generally a complainer of long movies, but this deserved the extended length treatment. I wish I could have seen it in the theater. The performances are phenomenal (and surprising, in the case of De Niro).