Cheryl McColganFounder, Heal Nourish Grow LLC · Events, Content and Marketing, Podcast Host.

Why Body Weight Scales Are Trash

26 Nov 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:58

In this YouTube monologue, the speaker shares personal experience using DEXA scans over a six‑month period to illustrate how traditional bathroom scales can be misleading. Despite consistent workouts, the scale showed no weight change because the speaker simultaneously gained three pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat, leaving total body mass unchanged. The speaker explains that without precise body‑composition tools like DEXA, one might mistakenly think no progress was made, leading to discouragement. To address this, the speaker advocates using body‑fat scales as a more informative, everyday alternative for tracking composition changes, emphasizing their role in providing feedback that a plain weight number cannot.

Chapters

So oftentimes what has happened on the scale, and I can track this because I've gotten several DEXA scans over time when I was making this a new goal of mine, is that, for example, in a 6-month period, even though I'd been working out really consistently, consistently, and doing a lot of things that should have affected my weight if I was looking at my weight as just the number on the scale, after 6 months my weight was exactly the same. It was crazy. And if you didn't have some kind of tool like a DEXA or whatever, you might have thought, well, I didn't make any progress at all. And it was It would really be easy to get discouraged. But what actually happened in that amount of time is that I had put on 3 pounds of muscle and lost 3 pounds of fat at the same time, which is really amazing. Yet with a traditional scale, all you get on the scale is that you were exactly the same. And so that can be really defeating. And so one of the tools— and I've talked about this over before— that I've used over the years is a body fat scale.