A Fantastic Bathroom Scale

A bohemian at heart, I typically wear aloha shirts to work. I had an occasion recently where I had to wear a sport coat. I've got a lovely one, but this time when I donned it, I discovered the buttons had moved. They no longer reached their button holes!

"Hmm. It looks," I thought to myself, "like it's time for a diet."

I've never dieted in my life. Being a goals freak, I decided to create a spreadsheet and measure progress daily. I figured I could increase activity and reduce intake to the tune of 500 calories a day, giving me a one pound per week weight loss glide path to success. I pulled out our trusty bathroom scale to get a starting point.

I couldn't read the thing. With my glasses or without them, I couldn't read the dial. I went to Target and picked out a digital scale with big numbers, brought it home and stood on it. I got a number. I stood on it again. I got a different number. And again. The scale readout was good to 0.2 pounds, but the sensor looked to be accurate to plus or minus 3 pounds. That was totally unsatisfactory for my daily data collection. I'd have no idea at all if I was heading in the right direction for weeks.

Googling the issue, I came across the scale below. It's totally awesome. It gives you the same result every time. It may not be perfectly accurate, but it's perfectly consistent, which is the most important feature of all. It's the delta that matters, not the actual values. So long as I see I'm on my glide path, or close enough to it, I'm good.

If you need a reliable scale, you could do a lot worse than this one.