This is why, between two successive measurements, I place one foot on the scale to measure the weight of just one leg (comes to 18-20 lbs). And the following (third) measurement is sufficiently different from the first one. I use this "weird trick" when I'm not happy with the first reading, and want a second opinion ;-)
Oh wow I always wondered why this happened as it felt vaguely weird, I was skeptical that these things were accurate enough to be so repeatable, but never suspected this.
I bought a cheap $20 off amazon and it was seemingly accurate to 0.1 lb. I tested by weighing myself plus a bowl with varying amounts of water and there's no "report the same weight if the measurements are close" behavior you describe.
This happens on mine if I don't let the scale calibrate before the first measure. The scale turns on if you step on it, so it's tempting to just put both feet on in quick succession while the scale it's still off. That will give you a wrong reading. If you step off, the scale calibrates, and the next reading will be right.
You should get two equal readings if for the first one you push on the scale with one feet, take it off, wait a few seconds, then weigh yourself.
I’ve never taken apart a bathroom scale or tried to measure any of the above, but my intuition is that this article completely misses the point. Bathroom scales don’t deform a whole lot, and humans are squishy! When you take a running leap onto a playground swing, you are part of an oscillating pendulum. When you step onto a scale, sure, there will be a transient, but there will also be a whole lot of noise as you balance, wiggle, breathe, etc, and I bet the latter is dominates the former.
A self-respecting bathroom scale (not the kind that is intentionally biased to read the same number twice in a row) acts like a moderately low-pass-filtered sensor. As you move a bit, the number changes.
So the scale is averaging over time, not waiting for some very stiff internal spring to stop oscillating.
when I renovate my bathroom I'm making a perfectly flat surface just for the scales.
Bathroom floors are not flat and when you put scales on them the torquing of the scales messes with its mesurements.
I can move my "smart scales" around the room and get a different result each time.
A running average is useless for something like a weight-losing diet (or for a weight-increasing diet). It is good only for verifying that your weight is stable.
When you are serious about losing weight, you must measure your weight every day at the same time and in the same relationship vs. eating/drinking and eliminating that.
You must lose weight neither too slow, nor too fast. A rate of around 100 to 150 grams per day is good.
Especially at the beginning of losing weight, accurate measurements of the weight are essential for adjusting the diet, i.e. when there is no weight loss one must eat less, and when the weight loss is too great, one can eat more.
A running average could not guide efficiently your decisions for the current day, whether to eat more or less. Most likely it would result in big oscillations around the ideal weight losing rate.
> A running average is useless for something like a weight-losing diet
I disagree, it worked fine for me, validating my ongoing calorie limits and estimates across several months and dozens of pounds.
> A running average could not guide efficiently your decisions for the current day, whether to eat more or less.
That's just using the wrong tool for the wrong job. You don't don't starve yourself today because you were constipated yesterday. (Or if you do, it's for issues of immediate discomfort rather than a dieting goal.)
Instead, you eat a consistent number of estimated calories, adjusting it to fit the observed trend in weight loss.
Paying too much attention to daily data points is also a psychological danger, people will put too much emphasis on noisy/singular data point and then use that as a rationale to give up or cheat.
Can you really measure your weight that accurately? What about your body's hydration level, or whether you've just taken a dump or not? Those would probably skew your measurement by half a pound.
Like I have said, you have to take the measurement every day at the same time and in the same order with respect to eating, drinking and dumps.
And yes, you can measure that accurately.
I had been obese for many years and I had many failed attempts to lose weight. This has changed only after I bought accurate digital scales and I have started to measure carefully, every day at the same time and in the same conditions.
During a day, your weight will vary a lot, perhaps by more than two pounds between the maximum and the minimum. Nevertheless, if you take care to measure at the same point every day, the accuracy is good enough, the uncertainty is less than 1/10 of a pound, if you are careful.
When I was losing weight, I could see very clearly the effect of eating one spoon more or one spoon less per day of certain foods, so I was eventually able to lose one third of my initial body weight, in about ten months.
This might be more true for a male than a female. Buildup of water in the body changes a lot and has nothing to do with what you eat. So measure your weight is very dangerous for your motivation if you eat almost nothing and still gain weight.
The buildup of water may change a lot, but it is not random.
When you eat similar things each day and you do similar amounts of physical activity, the buildup of water will also be mostly the same.
That is why during a weight decreasing diet or weight increasing diet you must observe a mostly constant diet.
If you eat wildly different kinds of food each day, with very variable amounts of carbohydrates and salt, then yes, you will not be able to monitor accurately your weight, due to the variable hydration of the body.
Also one must be aware that while gaining weight appears to happen instantly after a day with copious meals, frequently due to increased amounts of water retained in the body, at the beginning of a weight decreasing diet there can be a significant delay, e.g. of a week or even more, between decreasing the daily food intake and the beginning of weight decreasing.
Only after the weight has begun to decrease steadily (when the body has already decreased the metabolic rate to a minimum, in order to minimize its food necessities), then you can see the direct influence of greater or smaller daily intakes of food on the rate by which the weight decreases.
It's not random but it is also much larger variables than just what you eat. The body is very complicated. Women has the added fun of a monthly period and when that one stops, they have the even worse menopause. Not to mention a lot of difference depending on medical problems that anyone can have. It's great that it works for you but it does not work for a lot of people.
It's very frustrating that after eating exactly the same things and amounts for years, still the scale is jumping around just because of day of month.
That leaves you with a problem when it breaks, or the maker goes out of business so all the smart features (or in some cases the basic ones too) stop working, or the maker decides it isn't taking enough money from you so starts hawking ads before it'll show you any or your information, … You'll probably have a remodelling job to do to make any replacement device fit, rather than just placing the new device on the same flat surface.
thanks... I can rest easy that this is possible cause to why my kitchen scale is so slow... do not get a SOEHNLE Page scale if you value your sanity. It is so slow it can serve up counting down ads....
Most consumer bathroom scales are programmed to report exactly the same reading twice in a row, when the reading is close.
Passive damping may be smart, but stupid always wins.
This is why, between two successive measurements, I place one foot on the scale to measure the weight of just one leg (comes to 18-20 lbs). And the following (third) measurement is sufficiently different from the first one. I use this "weird trick" when I'm not happy with the first reading, and want a second opinion ;-)
Oh wow I always wondered why this happened as it felt vaguely weird, I was skeptical that these things were accurate enough to be so repeatable, but never suspected this.
I bought a cheap $20 off amazon and it was seemingly accurate to 0.1 lb. I tested by weighing myself plus a bowl with varying amounts of water and there's no "report the same weight if the measurements are close" behavior you describe.
That explains why I've sometimes weighed myself, peed, and then found that I gained weight
Interesting. Mine consistently shaves off ~2 pounds if I weigh myself twice in quick succession.
This happens on mine if I don't let the scale calibrate before the first measure. The scale turns on if you step on it, so it's tempting to just put both feet on in quick succession while the scale it's still off. That will give you a wrong reading. If you step off, the scale calibrates, and the next reading will be right.
You should get two equal readings if for the first one you push on the scale with one feet, take it off, wait a few seconds, then weigh yourself.
I’ve never taken apart a bathroom scale or tried to measure any of the above, but my intuition is that this article completely misses the point. Bathroom scales don’t deform a whole lot, and humans are squishy! When you take a running leap onto a playground swing, you are part of an oscillating pendulum. When you step onto a scale, sure, there will be a transient, but there will also be a whole lot of noise as you balance, wiggle, breathe, etc, and I bet the latter is dominates the former.
A self-respecting bathroom scale (not the kind that is intentionally biased to read the same number twice in a row) acts like a moderately low-pass-filtered sensor. As you move a bit, the number changes.
So the scale is averaging over time, not waiting for some very stiff internal spring to stop oscillating.
That does seem likely. You gotta think the scale is stiff enough that it’ll settle down in well under a second.
Often I see these mixed up:
Damping is restraining oscillation.
Dampening is making something wet.
In German, "dämpfen" means all of the above, and also "cooking in hot steam" :)
Dampening is also restraining.
So my morning routine is:
* Pee
* Weigh (naked)
* Perform morning routine
* Pee
* Weigh (naked)
My old scale had 0.2 lb granularity and certainly repeated the previous value if you stepped in it again within some certain time.
My new scale (Etekcity) is 0.1 granularity and often comes in at 0.1 or 0.2 lbs less on the 2nd weight in.
when I renovate my bathroom I'm making a perfectly flat surface just for the scales. Bathroom floors are not flat and when you put scales on them the torquing of the scales messes with its mesurements.
I can move my "smart scales" around the room and get a different result each time.
Is it really that important to weigh yourself THAT accurately? Your weight fluctuates throughout the day anyways, right?
Yeah, even with a perfect measuring-scale, people should be ignoring its daily reading in favor of a running average across multiple days.
A running average is useless for something like a weight-losing diet (or for a weight-increasing diet). It is good only for verifying that your weight is stable.
When you are serious about losing weight, you must measure your weight every day at the same time and in the same relationship vs. eating/drinking and eliminating that.
You must lose weight neither too slow, nor too fast. A rate of around 100 to 150 grams per day is good.
Especially at the beginning of losing weight, accurate measurements of the weight are essential for adjusting the diet, i.e. when there is no weight loss one must eat less, and when the weight loss is too great, one can eat more.
A running average could not guide efficiently your decisions for the current day, whether to eat more or less. Most likely it would result in big oscillations around the ideal weight losing rate.
> A running average is useless for something like a weight-losing diet
I disagree, it worked fine for me, validating my ongoing calorie limits and estimates across several months and dozens of pounds.
> A running average could not guide efficiently your decisions for the current day, whether to eat more or less.
That's just using the wrong tool for the wrong job. You don't don't starve yourself today because you were constipated yesterday. (Or if you do, it's for issues of immediate discomfort rather than a dieting goal.)
Instead, you eat a consistent number of estimated calories, adjusting it to fit the observed trend in weight loss.
Paying too much attention to daily data points is also a psychological danger, people will put too much emphasis on noisy/singular data point and then use that as a rationale to give up or cheat.
Can you really measure your weight that accurately? What about your body's hydration level, or whether you've just taken a dump or not? Those would probably skew your measurement by half a pound.
Like I have said, you have to take the measurement every day at the same time and in the same order with respect to eating, drinking and dumps.
And yes, you can measure that accurately.
I had been obese for many years and I had many failed attempts to lose weight. This has changed only after I bought accurate digital scales and I have started to measure carefully, every day at the same time and in the same conditions.
During a day, your weight will vary a lot, perhaps by more than two pounds between the maximum and the minimum. Nevertheless, if you take care to measure at the same point every day, the accuracy is good enough, the uncertainty is less than 1/10 of a pound, if you are careful.
When I was losing weight, I could see very clearly the effect of eating one spoon more or one spoon less per day of certain foods, so I was eventually able to lose one third of my initial body weight, in about ten months.
This might be more true for a male than a female. Buildup of water in the body changes a lot and has nothing to do with what you eat. So measure your weight is very dangerous for your motivation if you eat almost nothing and still gain weight.
The buildup of water may change a lot, but it is not random.
When you eat similar things each day and you do similar amounts of physical activity, the buildup of water will also be mostly the same.
That is why during a weight decreasing diet or weight increasing diet you must observe a mostly constant diet.
If you eat wildly different kinds of food each day, with very variable amounts of carbohydrates and salt, then yes, you will not be able to monitor accurately your weight, due to the variable hydration of the body.
Also one must be aware that while gaining weight appears to happen instantly after a day with copious meals, frequently due to increased amounts of water retained in the body, at the beginning of a weight decreasing diet there can be a significant delay, e.g. of a week or even more, between decreasing the daily food intake and the beginning of weight decreasing.
Only after the weight has begun to decrease steadily (when the body has already decreased the metabolic rate to a minimum, in order to minimize its food necessities), then you can see the direct influence of greater or smaller daily intakes of food on the rate by which the weight decreases.
It's not random but it is also much larger variables than just what you eat. The body is very complicated. Women has the added fun of a monthly period and when that one stops, they have the even worse menopause. Not to mention a lot of difference depending on medical problems that anyone can have. It's great that it works for you but it does not work for a lot of people.
It's very frustrating that after eating exactly the same things and amounts for years, still the scale is jumping around just because of day of month.
It would be less work to turn "bathroom scales" into "bedroom scales". Bathroom floors are not level for a good reason.
> Bathroom floors are not level for a good reason
Most residential bathrooms do not include a drain in the middle, at least in my part of the world.
Most residential bathroom floors here are as level as the tradesman can get them.
Huh, interesting. That's not the case in Australia, in all the houses I've seen. I always thought it was smart, though.
It's very common (maybe even code?) in commercial bathrooms in the US as well.
Not sure if the residential code is lagging, or if it's just not a popular design here.
No floor drains are required in commercial ICC code, but they're a really good idea.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IPC2021P3/chapter-4-fixtur...
Where I am in Aus, you can either have floor drains (with a specified fall in the floor) or each basin/bath has to have built-in overflow prevention.
Just build it into the floor like they build truck scales into the road.
That leaves you with a problem when it breaks, or the maker goes out of business so all the smart features (or in some cases the basic ones too) stop working, or the maker decides it isn't taking enough money from you so starts hawking ads before it'll show you any or your information, … You'll probably have a remodelling job to do to make any replacement device fit, rather than just placing the new device on the same flat surface.
...or just gain weight up to the point you can use an actual truck scale to weigh yourself. Seems more efficient to me.
thanks... I can rest easy that this is possible cause to why my kitchen scale is so slow... do not get a SOEHNLE Page scale if you value your sanity. It is so slow it can serve up counting down ads....
I tried repeatability on a few electronic scales at the shop and none had it, so I stuck with my old mechanical scale. Reason: It Just Works.