Monday, February 13, 2012

Why induction BF measurement scales are useless

Or at least are profoundly misleading.

Nope I'm going to go with useless.  You remember me mentioning I could get the percentage to jump by as much as 7% by flexing certain muscles?  Or perhaps 5% by drinking 16 oz of water and then waiting 15 minutes?

Anyway here is my Weight loss chart:


Note the steady (cheat days excepted) downward progression?

Here is my fat loss chart, as measured by my scale:


So... I have lost 20 lbs, increased my muscle mass through exercise and you are saying my BF% has gone up?

I don't think so.

Eagle eyed readers may note that my current weight and BF% are shown here, something I have avoided mentioning,  You may feel free to ignore it.  I didn't initially mention my starting weight, because frankly it's embarrassing.  People never believe me when I told them how much I weigh(ed) and apparently I carried it well.

However, as the weight comes off I feel more self confident, and less sensitive to the subject.  I still don't intend to trumpet my weight until I meet my three month goal.  Then I might post before and after pictures.

Or your reward for for me reaching it is not to do so.  :P

2 comments:

  1. Hey, congrats on the progress!

    The first chart is pretty interesting, in that I never realized just how much cheat day affected things (though that may also be a side effect of being strangely loath to look at the scale the day after...).

    The second chart is interesting in a "Hey, this scale would make an excellent range day target when its useful life is done" sort of way.

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    Replies
    1. A lot of people seem to advocate weekly weighing, but I find daily weighing as identical situations I can manage very instructive.

      For example, Tuesday I had a platonic dinner with a...person... and there was Chicken Alfredo and Chocolate mini-donuts involved.

      My weight this morning (since I forgot to record yesterdays for some reason) was up 1.2 from Saturday morning. So adding an extra cheat day basically cost me at least two pounds since I should be down a pound from Monday.

      So that's a good motivator. Every extra cheat day sets me back 3-4 days.

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