Whether you’re trying to gain or lose weight you should be setting goals and targets to keep yourself motivated. This is where a good set of scales can help, weight gain or loss isn’t as straight forward as you may think. A loss on the scales could mean an increase in body fat and a loss of muscle mass and vice versa.

It’s no secret that the amount of body fat you carry will make a difference to the shape of your body and more importantly – your health.

Body shape is affected by body fat percentage due to the fact that fatty tissue takes up more space than muscle tissue. For example a balloon containing 1lb of muscle tissue would be smaller than a balloon containing 1lb of fat.

This means (for example) a woman who stands 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 10 stone (140lb) who regularly weight trains and lives an active lifestyle will have a much lower body fat percentage, and look considerably slimmer than a woman of the same height and weight who has a higher percentage of bodyfat and does not do any weight training or regular exercise.

Measuring changes in body fat percentage, rather than just measuring changes in weight, can be very motivational when you’re dieting – especially if you are exercising as part of your Weight Loss regime.

Body composition

Knowing how much you weigh isn’t the be all and end all. Knowing your body composition will give you a bigger overall picture of your health and your progress towards a goal. Most of the scales we have on offer have a specific ‘athlete’ mode for those of you trying to gain lean muscle and a standard mode for those trying to cut away the fat.

How body fat is measured

Up until fairly recently, the only way to get an accurate body fat reading was to go see a professional. Bioelectrical Impedance technology became widely available not too long ago which made this affordable and easy to integrate into home scales.

It works by sending an extremely low level signal through the users body, the signal is sent through the sensors on top of the scale. The signal travels quickly through any lean tissue, lean tissue is made up of a high percentage of water which makes it a good conductor of an electric current and in turn fat has a lower percentage of water which makes it a poor conductor. Bioelectrical Impedance devices can interprit this signal and use it to determine the body fat percentage of the user.