Tag Archives: diet

I am a huge fan of the Fitbit Aria scale, even when it is brutally honest about my weight situation. It prevents me from deceiving myself about how I am doing. And it encourages me if I’m making even a bit of progress.

The Aria scale measures both your weight and your body fat percentage to the fraction of a pound.  (It also gives you your BMI, but I don’t care about that). That little bit of accuracy helps. I found when I was dieting, sometimes knowing that my weight went down by a fraction of a percentage helped me get through the day. (Motivation often turns on small points like this.) Likewise, right now with the pandemic I see my weight going up by a fraction of a pound every week. So I am trying to get it to go down by a fraction of a pound every week. A half pound every week adds up to 25 pounds in a year.

Having both those numbers prevent you from fooling yourself. If you go on a low carb diet, your weight may drop suddenly, but your body fat percentage may go up alot. (In the past mine did). That tells me that I am not really losing fat or even muscle that quickly. It’s likely water. Over time I did lose weight, but that initial weight loss isn’t what I thought.

The flip side of that is I have noticed my body fat percentage has gone up during the pandemic even though my body weight has stabilized. Makes sense: my physical effort has really gone down hill during the pandemic, and so my muscles have decreased. Sadly. That’s very different from situations I have had in the pre pandemic times when I was working out and my weight was staying the same but my body fat was decreasing. That was good: I was replacing fat with muscle.

Since I also have a fitbit for tracking my activity, all of those numbers sync up in the Fitbit app, which makes it easier for me to track the relationship between my activity and my weight.

I can also use it to track my mental state too. I can tell when I have had stressful times in my life because I either stop eating and suddenly lose weight fast, or I start eating a lot and gain weight fast. I might think I am doing fine, but the numbers say otherwise.

It’s not perfect (what is?).  I tend to weigh myself the first thing every morning. If  eat a carb heavy meal the night before, my weight will be up. If I stop eating early in the evening, my weight will go down. I don’t worry about it though: I am mostly focused on the trends.

I have gone through two of these scales now and if this one dies, I will certainly get another one. I find it too easy to deceive myself about my weight: the Aria scale is the brutally honest friend I need to stay on track.