LipidDoc_ATL said:

DEXA scan update relevant to protein intake: Scanned at months 0, 6, and 12.

Agreed on the ranges, with the condition that a single DEXA is not a measurement, it is one draw from a distribution. Hydration status moves the lean compartment by a kilogram or more between scans, so any comparison of scans done at different times of day or different hydration states is noise.

jason_paloalto said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

That holds where the measurement is reliable. Where it is noisy — and a lot of what gets tracked here is noisy — the same reasoning produces confident nonsense.

jason_paloalto said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

This is exactly what I could not find anywhere else. Printing the relevant bit and taking it with me.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful.