Help with body fat monitor/bathroom scales please

Hi all. I want to buy one of them new-fangled body fat monitor bathrrom scales, see. But I am overwhelmed and confused, much like Caveman Lawyer, by the multitude of options.

This one has handles on a cord you pull out and hold. Anyone have one of these? Will it break easily I wonder?

This one has no handles and is commensurately cheaper. I can’t tell what the damn difference is. Anyone?

Here’s the other most popular brand, Tanita. What about this one, anyone have it?

Any help, advice or recommendations you all can make will be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Don’t waste your money. They’re all extremely inaccurate.

I have an older-model Tanita. The weight is fairly accurate, and the body fat monitor is . . . well, not accurate, but pretty good at telling me whether I’m dehydrated.

Does it do anything that you couldn’t do by mearly weighing and measuring yourself to get your BMI? I mean, suppose someone is muscular, is the scale going to be any more accurate for them than their generic BMI? I’m thinking not.

I’d like to keep an eye as I continue to lose weight on if I am losing/gaining body fat as well as poundage. I have lost a decent amount of muscle mass as well as fat and I want to keep an eye on both. Hoping that someone who has used these things can chime in to speak on whether they work at all.

I did a little bit of internet research on them a while back. Seems they’re basically useless for measuring body fat–really only tell you how much water you’ve got in your system. Try body fat calipers instead.

I have an older model Tanita and I actually find it very useful. Not so much to get an exact answer to body composition, but to see a trend in how I am doing in trying to improve my body composition. I recently had a BodPod analysis done, which is supposed to be about as accurate as you can get, and my Tanita was off by about 2% on the low end.

Save your money. Buy calipers.

Yup, they don’t work.