Electronic Weighing Scales & Body Fat, Are they Accurate?

Every year, there are always new sophisticated tools used in tracking our weight and body fat. Along with their promising advanced functions is the price that is higher than conventional weighing scales and calipers. But how accurate are they, really? Is it worth it to pay for extra dollars or is it just better to just stick to our old measuring tools?

Why Electronic Scales Can Be Superior?

While mechanical weighing scales can indeed consistently gauge your weight, the problem arises with the way we read the scale itself. Is it 59.60 or just 59.50 kg? Reading manual scales can be a matter of judgment and can change depending on the angle where you’re looking.

If you’re reading your own weight, a slight tilt of your vision to the right can understate your weight, while a tilt to the left can lead to an overstatement. If you aim to monitor your weight changes, mechanical weighing scales can be a bit misleading. How precise can you be to have the same angle when you read your weight last week? You might either erroneously celebrate your progress for a 0.50 decrease or blame yourself for eating that donut causing a 0.10 increase in your weight.

This is where electronic scales and body fat calculators step into the scene. You simply weigh in and it will instantly give you the number in two decimal places. Apart from it diminishes judgment in reading the scale, it tracks your weight to the nearest hundredths. This gives us a sense of accomplishment and although these are just trivial changes in our weight, we know that our routine and diet are indeed working.

Is Accuracy Important?

For most of us, we use our weighing scales and calipers to monitor our body changes periodically. From here, we assess the efficacy of our diet plans and workouts, and tweak them accordingly. If your real weight is 60kg, but it reads as 59kg on an electronic scale, there is nothing to worry about for as long as it will give you the same result consistently in multiple attempts on the same instance.

At the end of the day, what we are tracking is the periodic change in weight, not the weight itself, for that is the metric that we’re after. Precise reading of one’s weight is important for a competition that has a specific requirement on that aspect, but for monitoring purposes, accuracy is less important.

It’s Not About Weight!

Weight is just one metric of progress. When we see slow changes from these metrics, it can deter us from sticking to our routine, having a false impression that our diet and routines are not working. Hence, it’s not always good to rely on our weight. Alternatively, you can take weekly pictures of your body and use tape measures to gauge your body girths.

Weight can stay constant but as you convert those fats into lean mass, you might be missing the fact that you actually improve.

Conclusion

Weighing scales may not be accurate if you want to know your exact weight as of the moment. Even the scales used by physicians will read a different figure from the scales that you will see in the gym. At the end of the day, these tools are for progress monitoring purposes and for as long as they serve this purpose, we can remove accuracy from the picture and focus more on its consistency.