JJ Virgin explains why the bathroom scale misleads women tracking weight loss. She recommends bioimpedance scales like InBody or BODi paired with weekly waist and hip measurements, since muscle gain increases water weight even as your body shape improves. Daily fluctuations from hydration and digestion make single readings meaningless.
All right, so here's the first thing that has to happen before anything else. You have to do some kind of body composition analysis so that you be— don't become crazy. And I say this because women, we are crazy. And if we start doing this and we see our clothing size go down but our weight go up, we think it's not working. We have got to stop using a traditional scale. It doesn't give you any of the right information. And then at home, you want to have a bioimpedance scale at home. And now InBody's got some great home units. And what's cool about BODi, they can buy one online. Buy one online. Okay, great. You can— you get a Bioimpedance scale and you get a Bluetooth tape measure. Here's what you do. You get on that scale every day under the same conditions, which means get up, go to the bathroom, get on the scale. You do not focus on the scale and get all weird about the scale. You let the numbers in the scale go to your phone. You don't even have to look. You can just let the numbers on the scale go to the phone. Once a week, you also do your waist and your hip measurement. That's when you take the average to see what's happening. Because if we look at the numbers every single day, they go like— they make no sense whatsoever. You're overhydrated, you're dehydrated, you're constipated. Like, makes no sense whatsoever, you know. And the other piece is, when we're looking at bioimpedance, we're looking at your total body water. This is a proxy for your fat-free mass. When you have more muscle— it's the biggest thing that we can shift, right, is muscle mass— muscle has carbohydrates and water that store in it. And so more muscle, more water.
