Digital Bathroom Scales at Last!

I’ve been using old fashioned bathroom scales for years and knew they were rubbish because I weighed something different every time I stood on them. However, I found a way of using them and apparently reduced my weight by 33lbs from 14st10lb on 19th April to 12st5lb on 27 November but I finally got fed up with the innate inaccuracy of scales which use a physical balance to turn a circular disk to tell you what you weigh.

I found a site which recommends The top six best digital scales for measuring body fat and ordered some Etekcity Smart Fitness Scales which provide a more accurate weight because they don’t depend on a physical balance turning a wheel but on a piezoelectric pressure sensitive device which delivers an electrical signal proportional to the stress (your weight) that is applied to it. It also measures the electrical impedance from one foot around the body to the other foot in such a way as to provide other information such as: BMI, Body Fat %, Fat-free Body Weight, Subcutaneous Fat %, Visceral Fat, Body Water, Skeletal Muscle, Muscle Mass, Bone Mass, Protein, BMR and Metabolic Age. I’m not sure I believe that all that can be deduced from the impedance of your body to an electric current but it is interesting!

It arrived yesterday but I wasn’t in so I went round to the delivery office to collect it this morning before breakfast. I installed the VeSyncFit app on my mobile phone which communicates with the scales using bluetooth, signed up for a free account and activated the batteries in the scales to try it out. This is the result:

Which means my old scales were weighing 7lbs too light but it makes no difference to how much weight I lost since 19 April – it just means my starting weight was nearer 15st3lb than the 14st10lb I thought it was!

I can run the VeSyncFit app while or after using the scales and it provides me with all the above information as a picture which I can save to Microsoft Onedrive via Samsung Cloud and access from my laptop.

My BMI warns that I’m overweight but 25 is only 0.1 greater than the maximum recommended as normal for my height and I’m more muscular than it thinks as you can see here! I’m not sure about Metabolic Age but my resting pulse is usually around 45 beats per minutes which either means I’m on the way out or I’m as fit as an athlete! I discovered that if I tap the measurement on my phone it tells me that my Metabolic Age is 50% of my actual age – ie 75/2 = 37.5 – while the ideal figure is 66% so I’m doing very well apparently!

I measured my weight before and after today’s salsa walk and discovered that I had lost 1.8lbs of sweat. That’s quite useful as it tells me how much water I should drink to make up for it. I like my new digital scales whereas I hated my old physical one! I don’t worry too much about what my weight should be as all I have to do is stick with my Natural Low Density Eating and my body will decide for itself. I can tell that I’m more or less there simply because my Nauli Kriya exercise is almost as good as it was 17 years ago. What I can do now is only possible because my Visceral Fat is low enough to allow a substantial hollow in my abdomen to form when I breath out and raise my chest.

The following morning my weight before breakfast was 12st9.6lb. The comparison data on the right (click or tap to enlarge) shows that my BMI at 24.9% is now considered normal but I can’t find any information about the standard for my Subcutaneous Fat at 19.8% which is considered high but I know it is far more important for my Visceral Fat percentage to be considered acceptable (as it is) and for my overall Body Fat percentage to be considered acceptable (as it is). I used the Body Fat Skinfold Calculator by Durnin and Womersley after measuring the 4 skinfolds required to calculate my body fat percentage and it came to 18.6% rather than 22.5% which no doubt means the estimate for Subcutaneous Fat is too high as well! Apparently this tends to happen with muscular men like me (as you can see from the high classification of my Muscle Mass which is 11lbs more than the norm). See this article: “For the most part, foot scales tend to underestimate rather than overestimate body fat (according to Obesity Facts, 2008). In people with athletic physiques, the scales tend to overestimate body fat. Even if estimates aren’t entirely accurate, however, you can still use the data to help inform your diet and exercise decisions.“

Note in this article: 1 Pound of Fat vs. 1 Pound of Muscle how much bigger l pound of fat is compared with muscle showing how important it is to be careful that you lose fat when you diet and not muscle! You do this by being physical active while you diet to make sure your body realises that it needs to retain muscle!

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POP UP DETAILS OF BODY COMPOSITION MEASUREMENTS

When you use the VeSyncFit app and view the 13 measurements shown above you can tap on a particular one and get more detail in a pop up. Here they are:

There is one term that I didn’t understand at all and that’s Smooth Muscle but you won’t be surprised when you follow the link as what else could it be!
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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT DIGITAL BODY COMPOSITION SCALES

The best body composition scales are certified for medical use and the Marsden MBF-6000 Body Composition Scale with Printer is Class III Approved which means it can legally be used in hospitals for monitoring, diagnosis and treatment which means the measurements are accurate and can be trusted. See here for a detailed description of the meaning of body composition measurements that it provides (much more high quality detail than for the scales I bought) which means that I’m convinced that I would like to have one but the cost is prohibitive at £665.