Trying to lose weight? My mom is, or has been for a long time. All year she goes through stages of motivation to lose weight. Every New Year she makes the resolution to follow a rigorous exercise routine and a new diet. However, she gets discourage when she doesn’t notice any difference. After she exercised for 3 weeks the scale told her she weighed the same. I use to tell her that muscle weighed more than fat, so she was probably gaining muscle. Well, back then they didn’t have scales that could measure how much fat and muscle you had, so of course my mom just stuck to what the old scale said. It was pretty discouraging for her, and so she would give up exercising.

Recently I have found something that would have helped my mom have a better exercising habit and help her motivation: a digital body fat scale. When I was a kid digital scales were new and not considered accurate in their measurements. However, over the years they have come a long way in improvement. Digital scales are now accurate and advanced. I guess my mom could have taken the time to measure her fat in with the body calipers which are the original ‘fat’ meters, but that is not very accurate and requires a lot of measuring. Basically the body calipers are sort of a nuisance way to measure fat content. Usually doctors and physical trainers are trained to make sure they give you an accurate measurement. This way of measuring is still the most accurate means of measuring body fat, but you need to really know what you are doing to get an accurate measurement. Now you don’t need to go to a trainer or try figure out your body fat the old way, now you can use a digital scale to make it easier.

Advanced technology has made it so we can be our own personal trainer by using a body fat scale that can do it all for us. These body fat scales are accurate and use BIA (bioelectric impedance) to measure body fat percentage. Even if they say that BIA is perfected, I still wondered if a body fat scale really works. Well it does. Bioelectircal impedance analysis has be studied enough to change it from a guessing science to a true science. Although, we all know that hypothesis is different from theory. This has become almost more than a theory.

I wish my mom had a digital body fat scale when I was younger. With a body fat scale she could have had a more accurate view of how much fat she was actually losing. She would then have realized the importance of gauging how much fat and muscle she had instead of just some arbitrary weight. This is always important to remember: that weight loss and fat loss are not synonymous.