Needed: home scale recommendation!

So I've been using this scale my mom gave me for several months now. It is Thinner brand, a digital scale.
     [Side note: It says "THINNER" in big letters right above where it displays your weight. Whether this is intended to be motivational or mocking I am yet to decide but I am positive it is not coincidental.]

Anyhow; this scale has shown me stuck around 123(which would give me a 19 BMI), give or take a pound, for a month or more. I went to the doctor and was weighed in and the scale there put me at 128 point something. I finally got the nerve to get on the gym scale the other afternoon and it put me at 128.3. Both of these occured with clothes on, in the afternoon/evening. I usually weigh in naked in the mornings before I eat or drink anything. But I KNOW that I didn't gain 5 lbs with clothes and some food. So I've concluded that my home scale is wrong, which I already had suspicions about.

To get to the point, what type of scale do you guys recommend for at home? I'm not super obsessed at this point about losing weight since I'm comfortable with my size right now and am just trying to replace fat with muscle and work on body composition, so I don't need a scale to be exact with like .0004 precision.

Any answers with price and where to buy them would be helpful. I am dirt-poor college student, so please keep that in mind.

thanks!!
-soy

Ok I'm just gunna bump this once and then move it to another forum. I really need a recommendation!

Original Post by soy_vey:


 Both of these occured with clothes on, in the afternoon/evening. I usually weigh in naked in the mornings before I eat or drink anything. But I KNOW that I didn't gain 5 lbs with clothes and some food. So I've concluded that my home scale is wrong, which I already had suspicions about.

Soy -- you certainly can show a 5-7 lb difference from an early morning, naked weight to an afternoon/evening weight with clothes on.  There is probably nothing wrong with your scale.

But -- I have a weight watcher's scale that I picked up at Target -- cost $39

I just bought a Taylor scale at Walgreens (not a body-fat one, just a regular one, because the body-fat measurements are questionable on home-scales, especially if you are an athlete like I am). So far so good with it.

You may be able to recalibrate the scale you have (which should be done once a year or so anyway) rather than have to buy a new one. Check your manual or look online for instructions. And yes, it is possible to have your weight flux that much per day.

Thanks guys for the info. I can't calibrate the scale at all.. it's a real cheapo one that I think my mom got for free from a drug rep.

And normally I would agree that my weight could fluctuate that much in a day, but I really do feel that this scale is sort of a piece of c**p.
You don't recommend the body fat measurement ones? I have been meaning to get my body fat tested anyway and my gym makes me pay money to use the calibration tools, which I don't want to do. Are the body fat ones completely untrustworthy, it would be good to know since I've been working on trying to increase my muscle.

scales that measure body fat are very useful if you know how to use them.  by that, i mean that most people shouldn't be looking to them for absolute accuracy so much as for consistency across time.  if you are the sort of person who freaks out over tiny changes (e.g. you see many people on these forums who get almost absurdly depressed or upset by the fact that their scale says they are 1lb heavier today than yesterday), that may outweigh the benefits.  what you want to do is look at a general trendline - over time, are you losing fat and keeping LBM steady?  knowing your bodyfat percentage is the only way to know whether the weight you are losing is mostly fat.  and therefore, if fat loss is your goal, your real question should be: "what's the best way FOR ME to measure my bodyfat?"  your basic choices, if you're gonna be doing the measurements on your own, are do-it-yourself calipers (accumeasure makes an "easy-to-use" caliper which is very cheap and which you can use on your own.  i'm personally not a huge fan of using it on myself because it is a one-site model and therefore, i can gain fat and lose muscle but because i don't gain fat at the suprailaic site, such changes aren't picked up.  fyi, the suprailaic site is an inch or so above your hipbone, so it is likely to be useful to you over time if when you gain/lose weight, some of that is to/from your stomach.  it should also be noted that it takes a good amount of practice to learn how to get consistent measurements at all.  of course, the fact that i get bad results from it says nothing about whether you will.  it simply doesn't measure changes small enough to help me).  body-fat scales, OTOH, provide TRUE ease-of-use: step on them, get a measurement.  there are things that can throw the measurement off (e.g. if you are better hydrated or have more food in you one day than the next), but there are easy things to do to increase consistency, such as measuring at the same time every day and in the same way.

just doing a quick search, here are some previous posts about this topic you may want to check out:

http://www.calorie-count.com/forums/post/page /1/41074.html  response #32

http://www.calorie-count.com/forums/post/4683 9.html response#4

http://www.calorie-count.com/forums/post/4496 2.html response #4 and others

http://www.calorie-count.com/forums/post/5011 6.html post about the accuracy of accumeasure calipers

there are other posts where people gave recommendations, but as few of them seemed to have tried more than the scale they currently have, they won't be a TON of help.  you'd be just as well to look at reviews of the scales in your price range on amazon.

Wow, erinzz that was a great helpful response! I will keep this in mind for sure. I used a body fat scale at my school before I started weight training and my comp was really unhealthy, which prompted me to start, but the instructor gave me a warning on accuracy. I think maybe Ill just keep working out at the gym and then Ill pay to get my BF tested right before my gym membership runs out before I move(Im moving cities and going to have to join a new gym). Then I can see my progress over time.

Coincidentally, I got on the gym scale today sans shoes and weighed in at 124.5, mid day. So, who knows.

Thanks for all your suggestions guys.

well, you have two questions to ask yourself:

- how do they test BF% at your gym, and is it likely to be ANY MORE accurate than the methods you can do at home? 

- pure economics: because you'll want to tweak your workouts depending on what your BF%, combined with your overall weight, tell you (e.g. are you losing fat, but simultaneously losing more lean mass than is desirable), you want to get a BF test at least once per month.  unless you're doing an underwater weighing, there will be inaccuracy to various extents in ALL methods that you use.  therefore, if you measure even more frequently (once per week, say), you'll get a 'general trendline' more quickly - otherwise it could take months to know whether you're really going in the right direction, since it's nearly impossible to know that after just a couple readings.   if your gym charges, say, $10 for a BF test, over a year, doing it at the minimum of once per month, that comes to $120 - you can buy your own scale (what model you get will determine the price; some very expensive models are in the hundreds of dollars; the omron HF-500, IIRC, recommended by tgpish, is $70-80 new; i believe there are even cheaper ones available - as low as $20-30) or accumeasure calipers (about $8 including shipping on ebay) for far less than that, and take measurements more frequently.

again, absolute accuracy (what your REAL BF% is, to a decent degree of certainty) will only be discovered with an underwater weighing.  what's important is the trendline (that is, is your method consistent across time:  even if it tells you your BF is 22% when an underwater weighing would show it at 25%, that's not your concern [unless your major goal is getting to a certain BF% and being 100% certain that you're at that exact number] - what IS important is that if you lose fat, the method you're using can reliably tell you that.  all measurements have 'noise' - things that can throw off a reading here or there, which is why you shouldn't take any reading as gospel, but look over time: are you losing fat without losing significant LBM? 

so what IS your gym's method and how much does it cost?

the same thing i said for bodyfat goes for your weight in general:

unless it's very important for you to know EXACTLY what you weigh at a given time (which won't actually tell you much), it's ok if your scale is a bit inaccurate (e.g. 5 lbs low or high), so long as it is CONSISTENTLY so.  that is, just to take an example, it wouldn't matter if your scale shows you that you weigh 130 when you really weigh 135, so long as if you lose 2 lbs, it shows your weight to be 128 (knowing your weight to a certain degree of accuracy is necessary for knowing exactly how much fat or muscle your losing or gaining.  but again, you don't NEED to know exactly how many lbs of fat you're losing with absolute accuracy - you need to know that you're going in the right direction.  many scales may be inaccurate, but so long as they are precise, you should be ok).

here's the more important thing:  PICK ONE SCALE AND STICK WITH IT!!!  scales may be inaccurate to varying degrees, and you may not know which one is accurate.  but it doesn't matter so much.  so long as your scale is precise + consistent over time, there's no reason to step onto any other one, since it seems like it's just driving you nuts when you do so and get different results.

for weight, just like with body fat, you should care more about the trendline over time, not what your scale tells you RIGHT NOW.  when you weigh yourself daily, you do get more measurements so it's easier to know when one or two are bogus, but if it's something you're going to drive yourself nuts over (by not recognizing that the fact that the scale showed a 1lb weight gain since yesterday, taken alone, is meaningless), it may not be worth it to do it that often.  there are a ton of things that can throw off your measurement for a given day (and as a woman, sometimes even a week ;-)) - learn to accept that and to not make any decisions based on what ONE weighing (or even several) tells you.  if your scale show you weighing 122.5 on monday, 121.3 on tuesday, and 122.1 on wednesday, that's not enough information to say anything - unless you have a lot of weight to lose or doing extreme dieting (unhealthy), you're likely not gaining or losing MEANINGFUL weight (by which i mean, fat and/or muscle, not simply water weight, the amount of food that you've excreted, etc.) that quickly (in terms of the monday to tuesday difference - over 1lb in 1 day loss; or tuesday to wednesday's nearly 1lb gain), so it's probably tuesday that's 'off', although you can't know to what extent (tuesday could be a little low, wednesday could be a little high) - so instead of being upset on wednesday because you weigh more than you did on tuesday, perhaps you should be happy if, say, the entire week before you were getting consistent measurements in the 123 range: it's the downward trend over time, not any given day's measurement that matters.  and you need to learn to accept that, whatever scale you're using, so that you don't drive yourself nuts over small, or even large, short-term changes that likely aren't meaningful.

ps - from your picture, you have incredible skin!  what do you do to keep it like that?  i'm 26 and my skin looks basically how it did when i was a teenager (never awful, but icky breakouts from time to time, shiny in some places, dry in others), whereas my teenager daughter has great skin!  totally unfair! 

Something to keep in mind regarding low-end scales. The accuracy is not as important as the consistency. If your weight is not changing, and your scale reflects that, then a couple of pound variation from a High-end scale doesn't matter. All that matters is the knowledge that your scale is providing you with correct information regarding loss/gain as it pertains to you. You will still know if you lost or gained 5 pounds. Spend your money on something more important.

So, I will ask today at the gym about how to get my fat tested and how much it costs. If it's cheap-under 10 bucks, I'll just do it and get it done with.
I've decided not to buy a new scale. Im thinking about not weighing myself at home any more all together- just sticking with my measurements and the fit of my clothes and the scale at the gym.  I didn't mention before that I only weigh myself once a week, at the most. I can't handle the day to day weighings.. it's a little overkill for me. Body comp and muscle building is more important to me right now than physical weight. I'm within a healthy BMI so I'm not going to fret about every single pound. I think maybe I misrepresented my concerns on this OP and made it sound a little more drastic of an issue than it is.   :-)

erinzz- thank you so much for such great, indepth answers. I agree with you about the trend being more important than the numbers.  And thank you for the flattery! :- )  I have always had a rather clear complexion- I am very careful to stay out of the sun, use sunscreen, and wash my face twice a day with oatmeal soap and use moisturizer. It seems to work right for me. I have also been on BC for many years and have heard that it can help to keep your complexion clear, but I'm not sure if that goes for all brands or just the pill. I also don't wear foundation-only powder- because that stuff is ick ick ick for your skin.