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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The scales with electrical body fat measurements are crap, little better than random number generators. I have compared results on a few of those with actual DXA scans and the scales are way off. The readings sometimes also vary by 2% from day to day, which isn't physiologically possible. Don't waste your money.

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The scales are noisy, but the trendlines they provide are useful and match the visual appearance of my body. The biggest source of noise that I see is when I have a lot of carbs or sugar in a day and then retain water. Then I eat fewer carbs the next day and get rid of the excess water.

I have an app with my scale and I weigh every morning, the numbers never make sense but the trends do. Like over a whole month I see not only weight loss but other metrics that may be deviating.

I don't really care if my scale is accurate, I care if it's consistent.

Mine seems to correctly report my body fat going up or down as I gain or lose weight.

How do you know it's correct on body fat? Unless you have validated it against a known reliable test you can't be certain whether the weight you lost was fat or muscle.

I don't know if it's correct on body fat. I don't care if the body fat reading is correct, or even very close. I just care that it goes up or down. I don't know if my weight is correct either.

If I'm getting stronger and the body fat readings are consistently going down that's what I care about.

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