Weight and mass. Pounds and kilograms. The most important thing is that your bathroom scale is useful for you as an individual user. From my clicking around online, l have found various digital and analog and combination scales which are similar but not all the same.
My family has had the benefit of the services of a professional nutrionist for 2 separate stints over the years, for 2 of our children who needed help in this area. Actually when the nutritionist’s client is a child, she works with the food preparer/server of the household. l’m the “food lady” at my house and l had the opportunity to have these 2 positive experiences with nutritionists. We talked about all sorts of things and in our case the topic was not weight reduction. When the child was weighed bi-weekly or monthly what the nutritionist looked for was using the same scale, in the same way, consistently over time. Weigh ins at the pediatrition were also part of the overall plan however we didn’t compare number to number from the doctor’s office with the nutritionist’s scale’s results like apples to apples. We did look at trends and percentiles to get the real picture of how much progress was being made at the time if any. A few ounces got us jumping for joy at this stage in our lives. Again, thankfully we met with very good success with hard work, moral support and proper use of a tool called a scale. This brings us back to the topic of useful bathroom scales.
What do you want to do with your bathroom scale? Let it be a conscious, proactive reason that you can keep consistently in your mind over a period of time. Then look online for types of scales. Talk to friends and family, too. Give away or trade your scale with them if you are ready for a new scale in your bathroom. Oh and here is an idea, you don’t have to keep your scale in your bathroom if you want to shake it up a little bit at home. But where ever you put it, use it in the same place, the same way, to get a useful number.
Considering the human factors in actual use vs. perfect use of bathroom scales, this tip of consistent circumstances during the use of your scale is the best advice l can think of to help you make your scale useful even if it doesn’t have expensive bells and whistles and electronics.
Another side note is to realize that, even outside the laboratory, IRL “in real life”, mass and weight are different concepts. So if you expect your body composition to change due to the changes you are making in lifestyle (increase muscle mass or release fat deposits) please consider this when you look at adding a new scale to your routine.
Prevention Magazine, Moshe Morris, and apartmenttherapy.com have done some homework for us on brands of scales for your perusal.