Trigger Warning – scale talk…
Health talk often centers around numbers. Some are useful and some are not… but regardless, the numbers fascinate me.
I weigh myself every day… not to punish or berate myself for moving up or down or whatever… but because I am interested in how my behavior and work outs and eating, etc from the previous day have impacted my body and the only realistic way I can see that impact is on the scale.
But I love all the numbers.
I love to get my lab tests back when I go for my annual physical and see my cholesterol numbers - HDL, LDL, Triglycerides, and Thyroid and whatever other numbers that the doc decided to test for that time around.
Fascinating!
If I could afford it, I would go and have one of those resting metabolic rate tests. Now THERE’S a number I’d like to see. I am convinced that my body burns almost no calories at all (based on how it reacts to, say, a day at the Mexican Buffet). But i’d love to have a real test that told me exactly what I burn at rest, during exercise, etc. But those tests are a couple of hundred dollars, and I can always think of something better to do with that money (Mexican Buffet, anyone?)
So last week, in furtherance of my data collection crusade, I went on Amazon and ordered a new scale.
My existing scale is about 10 years old, and it’s quite a bit “off” from the Dr. scale – which is fine, really, because for me, the actual number that it reads isn’t really as important as whether it’s staying pretty much the same. But still, I thought it might be nice to have a more accurate one, and so I splurged.
I bought a super-fancy new scale that not only tells me my weight, it also runs a little electric current through the body and tells the percentage of body fat and the percentage of water.
This to me is some super cool info. Water percentage? I try to stay properly hydrated, but knowing the actual percent will be interesting… and seeing how it varies day to day, etc. is something I will look forward to. Body fat percentage is also something I want to know about. One of my current fitness goals is to get stronger, and put some additional muscle on my core and upper body. The body fat percentage is really just a backwards way of being able to tell if I am adding muscle to my frame, so that’s going to help in tracking that goal.
One of the things I like about this scale is all the warnings that the company had out on their web site – most specifically aimed at women, telling them how important it is to not try to get body fat percentage down below the recommended range for their age, and explaining the difference between how much body fat a “regular” person should have vs. a professional weight lifter, etc. It just seemed nice to me that a company that sells a product that could so clearly be a negative influence on someone who had an eating disorder would take any time at all to think about warning people not to use the data to beat themselves up. (of course, it’s still a fitness product company, they only went so far).
Anyway – It shipped last week, and the UPS tracker claims that it should show up tomorrow.
Excited for new numbers!
