BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Low Carb Is your Weight Scale Valid?

We've had a scale for several years now that we loved. It gives body fat, muscle mass, and all sorts of other values. We relied on it for everything.

From 2006 (so before this scale) through August 2010 my weight swayed between 130 and 140 pounds. My fat percentages would go up and down as I became more active or less active, but my weight was fairly steady in that range.

Then in August 2010 or so we joined a local health club and my weight and Bob (my boyfriend)'s weight marched slowly but steadily downwards. Over the months I got into the 120s and was thrilled. Then in late February I got down to 118 and got concerned. That's too light for me, and really, I didn't feel that fit so I was more concerned that I was getting sick. When last week the scale read 113 I hit my limit. We were buying a brand new scale and if it gave the same value I was going to a doctor immediately. Something was wrong.

Well, something *was* wrong. The new scale came in today and I hopped on it. Hmph. I'm 137. Now, I worked out almost daily from August through perhaps December - and then I got so backlogged with work that I put it all aside. So I haven't done much of anything since then. So it *could* be that the dropping numbers were valid through then and then the scale went haywire.

It's even worse for Bob. He started at about 300 in August and has been putting in 2-3 hour days at the gym every day, working on aerobics, strength training, flexibility, rotating his workouts between muscle groups, and so on. He is giving it a solid effort. The broken scale had shown him steadily decreasing by about 2 pounds a week - which seemed reasonable - and had him down to 220 now. Unfortunately the new scale has him at about 255 and that's fairly discouraging for him.

Still he has lost a *lot* of weight, gone down greatly in waist size and so on, he's definitely in far better shape. But still having that scale mis-represent numbers for a long block of time is frustrating.

Which made me wonder - do any of you ever verify your scale's numbers somehow? While we were waiting for our new scale to appear we pondered all sorts of ideas for testing out the old scale, like weighing my textbooks one by one on our kitchen scale and then stacking them onto the old scale to see what it said for their total. Or measuring a precise amount of water into a bucket, and knowing the weight of what that volume of water would weigh, figuring that out. But in the end we just waited for the new scale to show up.

In any case, I am *very* happy that I don't have some sort of an illness. That did concern me. If my "only" problem is that I need to get more active, that's something I can work on.