Our mission at BodyStats is to make advanced health tracking available to everyone. Part of that mission is sharing what we find — not just the printout in your hand, but the patterns that show up when we look across thousands of customers.

Most DEXA studios scan you, hand you a report, and you walk out. We keep the data. When someone comes back for a second, third, or tenth scan, we can do something most clinics can’t: watch how a real body changes over time. So we did.

What we did

We pulled every BodyStats customer who has had two or more DEXA scans with us — 1,499 people, 8,981 scans in total. From each customer’s timeline, we identified weight-loss periods (intervals where fat mass had dropped from a previous peak), then averaged the month-by-month change in fat and lean (muscle) mass while the cut was still active.

A few notes on the methodology:

The first 30 days of any cut are excluded. Early “fat loss” is dominated by water and glycogen — not real tissue change — and we didn’t want that noise in the per-month rates.
A cut “ends” the moment fat mass exceeds the customer’s starting peak. Rebounds aren’t folded into the cut average.
Every scan is on the same Hologic Horizon W machine. No cross-device noise.
We report both the median (the typical customer) and the mean (the average customer). They tell different stories — see below.

Of those 1,499 customers, 958 had at least one weight-loss period — 588 men and 370 women — yielding 991 distinct cut episodes and 1,790 monthly intervals (1,193 male, 597 female), all measured on the same equipment.

Median male fat & muscle change

588 men contributed to this view. Large number = the median (typical customer). Smaller “AVG” number underneath = the mean (the average outcome, including outliers).

Months	Δ Weight	Δ Fat	Δ Muscle	n
Month 1 – 2	−3.1lb avg −3.3	−2.8lb avg −3.5	0.0lb avg +0.2	200
Month 2 – 3	−2.2lb avg −2.8	−2.2lb avg −2.6	−0.2lb avg −0.2	211
Month 3 – 4	−1.7lb avg −1.8	−1.3lb avg −1.6	−0.3lb avg −0.2	164
Month 4 – 6	−0.9lb avg −1.2	−0.9lb avg −1.0	−0.1lb avg −0.2	176
Month 6 – 9	−0.7lb avg −0.8	−0.5lb avg +0.4	−0.2lb avg −1.2	196
Month 9 – 12	−0.2lb avg −0.2	−0.3lb avg −0.4	−0.1lb avg +0.2	108
12+ months	−0.1lb avg +0.8	−0.3lb avg 0.0	+0.3lb avg +0.8	57

Median male fat, muscle, and weight change during weight loss across 901 BodyStats customers.

Fat-loss rate declines steadily — fastest in the first two months, decelerating each month after. The typical man (median) keeps losing some fat through the 12+ month bucket, but at a fraction of the early rate.

Muscle change stays modest throughout. The median lifter loses about 0.1 to 0.3 lb of muscle per month during a cut — small enough that on any given month it could be measurement noise.

Watch the gap between median and mean at month 6–9. The median says fat loss has slowed to −0.5 lb/mo. The mean says it’s reversed to +0.4 lb/mo. The mean is being pulled by a long tail of customers whose cuts stalled out hard or rebounded. The typical experience and the average experience diverge at this point — both are real outcomes. If your scans look like the median, you’re in the company of most cutters. If they look like the mean, you’ve hit a wall most don’t.

Median female fat & muscle change

370 women, same treatment:

Months	Δ Weight	Δ Fat	Δ Muscle	n
Month 1 – 2	−2.6lb avg −3.1	−2.3lb avg −2.9	−0.3lb avg −0.2	84
Month 2 – 3	−1.1lb avg −1.5	−1.6lb avg −1.8	+0.3lb avg +0.3	98
Month 3 – 4	−0.8lb avg −1.1	−0.8lb avg −1.2	+0.1lb avg 0.0	93
Month 4 – 6	−0.9lb avg −1.1	−0.9lb avg −1.1	+0.1lb avg 0.0	105
Month 6 – 9	−0.6lb avg −0.7	−0.4lb avg −0.7	−0.1lb avg 0.0	104
Month 9 – 12	−0.3lb avg −0.6	−0.3lb avg −0.3	−0.1lb avg −0.3	59
12+ months	−0.3lb avg −0.4	−0.4lb avg −0.4	0.0lb avg 0.0	32

Median female fat, muscle, and weight change during weight loss across 630 BodyStats customers.

The fat-loss curve has the same shape — fast early, slowing each month — but flatter. Where the men’s data has a sharp gap between median and mean at month 6–9, women’s stays tight. Median and mean are almost on top of each other. That means less variance: the typical female outcome is the average female outcome.

Muscle change stays effectively at zero across nearly every bucket studied. Whether that’s hormonal protection, lower absolute lean mass, or a more engaged training base — we can’t say from this data. But the signal is consistent.

A few notes on what you’re looking at

These are averages, not individual outcomes. A few other things worth knowing:

Customers who come back are an engaged group. They probably train and eat more deliberately than the average dieter. “What works on average” here is filtered through that.
We don’t have nutrition or training logs alongside the scans. We can see what changed; we can’t say why.
“Cutting” here means losing fat below a previous peak. Not a structured deficit, not a coach’s program — just the body composition moving downward.
Use median first. Mean is informative but vulnerable to outliers, especially in smaller buckets (the 12+ month bucket for men has only 57 intervals — one or two extreme readings move the mean visibly).

None of that invalidates the picture. It does mean a single average shouldn’t override what your own scans are telling you.

What we’ll look at next

This is the first of what we’d like to be a regular thing — pulling questions out of our own data and answering them in the open. There’s a lot we haven’t looked at yet: age bands, training-experience cohorts, recomp versus pure cut, regional fat distribution, what happens during a maintenance phase, what happens during a recomposition attempt, how visceral fat moves separately from total fat. The list is long.

If there’s something you want to see, tell us. Leave a comment on the Instagram post that goes with this article (@body.stats), or reach out directly. We’ll pull what we can pull.

Our mission is to make advanced health tracking available to everyone. That includes the knowledge we gain along the way.