I’m 63 and need to lose weight due to high blood sugar. I have altered my diet and exercise every day.
When I step on my scale, it goes from 0 to 300 for 6 weeks. Now, I know I’m not wasting away to nothing but my clothes are getting bigger, so, I’m losing some weight.
This scale sucks and I need to get another one. Are the digital scales any better ?
I am on a limited income, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money. It don’t have to be super accurate but I don’t want all my hard work to be in vane.
I just want to know that I am losing some weight from week to week.
Muscle is denser than fat so it takes up less room. If you’re gaining muscle and losing fat at the same rate, you’ll get smaller without changing weight.
Yep. Dump the scale and use a tape measure instead.
Be sure your scales are on a hard surface and keep up with the diet and exercise. You will soon see some return.
If you are a member of a gym or YMCA, use theirs. Sometimes they are even calibrated to ensure accuracy.
You can buy scales that also do a body fat measurement, but they are more expensive.
I’m not sure what this means-- You might weigh 300 pounds, but you certainly don’t weigh 0, and if your scale is ever telling you that you do, then the scale is completely broken and should be thrown away.
As long as it repeats and is reasonably accurate, you should be able to track your weight loss pretty well. Let’s say that it is 5% off, a huge error as far as these things go. You may not know how much you weigh from day to day but your loss will be within a half a pound till you lose more than 100lbs.
Oops, obvious arithmetic error. Anyway, the point is that you’ll be within a ‘couple pounds’ of your true loss which is typical of a day by day weight swing anyway.
I presume that modern digital scales measure your weight by piezoelectricity; is that more reliable than the old spring-type bathroom scale?
In my experience one can easily be plus or minus 3 pounds just by how much water your’re retaining that day. Especially when you’re severely obese (I’m only 5’8" and I was up to 280 at one point), it’s not worth obsessing over a “mere” five pounds; and reduction of both weight and waist size ARE erratic due to former fat tissue temporarily retaining water. Given that a steady loss of two pounds a week is considered fast weight loss and one pound a week is considered more average, you can drive yourself crazy constantly checking your weight. If you’re trying to lose more than fifty pounds, my advice is to only weigh yourself once a month at most.
Strain gauge transducers, actually. In short, they bond (glue) a piece of electrically resistive material to a chunk of metal that has been machined to flex in linear fashion within a range of loads. The electrical resistance changes and the change in voltage across the gauge is measured. This corresponds to the force applied. In a scale, this force is due to weight (we hope).
Strain gauges are considered more reliable than spring-based force measurement devices but like anything else, some are better than others.
Maybe you weigh more than 300lbs but your scale only goes up to 300lbs, so until you get below 300lbs you will always appear to weigh 300lbs as that’s the maximum the scale will go to?
This was my thought too. For example, if previously, the OP weighed 318, now he weighs 302… that’s enough weightloss to notice but either way the scale can only read 300.