P'shaw (she/they) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pshaw_raven) wrote2023-04-04 08:11 am
pshaw_raven) wrote2023-04-04 08:11 am
Entry tags:
The Weight of Water
I'm so done with my Garmin S2 scale. Holy shit I'm just completely done.
There are threads all over Garmin's support site about how inaccurate the scale is. Raw weight isn't a problem but the body fat and muscle readings are garbage, and people keep asking about it, and Garmin keeps doing nothing to improve the situation. I've known that these readings aren't correct this entire time, but just seeing the number every day tends to worm its way into my consciousness and it's just back there, whispering at me about how terrible I am.
See, Garmin uses bioimpedance, like most home body fat measurement things. It sends a small electrical current through you, and the idea is that the difference in water content between fat and muscle, when plugged into an algorithm will tell you in general what proportions you have of lean mass to fat, etc. Electricity being what it is, it seeks the fastest way to ground, so instead of traveling around your whole body, it just goes up one leg and down the other.
This thing seems to not really know how much water I have in my body. I drink black coffee in the morning, then water the rest of the day. I know I'm well hydrated by looking at my pee. I have none of the signs of even minor dehydration. Yet the Garmin scale will tell me I have something like 49% body water. Some days it even reads lower at night than in the morning, so I got more dehydrated while drinking all day? And that water percentage is how it computes fat, so as it insists I'm shriveling up like a mummy, I'm also gaining massive amounts of body fat.
Bonus round: I somehow gain and lose about half a pound of bone each day. So part of my skeleton is apparently out there doing stuff without the rest of me.
I remembered a pertinent piece of information about myself this morning and refined my search terms, only to come up with threads about my exact problem. Women using this scale find that it hugely overestimates their body fat. One woman saw a big jump in percentages from one day to the next just by switching from her previous brand of scale to the Garmin. Weighing herself on both one morning, the readings were so far from each other as to be laughable. People were weighing in (LOL) to say that rather than actually measuring body fat, it looks like the scale simply uses whole population averages, and spits those out based on your height and weight. Of course, Garmin support keeps shutting these threads down.
I'm considering buying a basic scale at Walmart or something and just sticking it in my bathroom. The nice thing about the Garmin is that it delivers those readings right to my app, but if the information isn't even accurate, why bother? The main thing I need to keep an eye on is my basic overall weight. Especially with summer coming and marathon training beginning soon, I like to make sure that number doesn't drop too sharply, because it means something's wrong. It's also helpful for checking my sweat loss, though Garmin does seem to be good at figuring that one out. It's always lined up pretty tightly with my own observations.
I've been pretty happy with everything else from Garmin that I've ever had, but this scale is a hot mess. And I just got a new Forerunner which I'm super stoked with, so I'm feeling extra-happy about Garmin right now, riding high on improved GPS tracking and more sensitive health monitoring. Except for that stupid scale.
In short, bioimpedance is not really useful for what I need and while it might be good for averaging data over large populations, like BMI, it has limited relevance to individuals trying to track changes in body composition.
There are threads all over Garmin's support site about how inaccurate the scale is. Raw weight isn't a problem but the body fat and muscle readings are garbage, and people keep asking about it, and Garmin keeps doing nothing to improve the situation. I've known that these readings aren't correct this entire time, but just seeing the number every day tends to worm its way into my consciousness and it's just back there, whispering at me about how terrible I am.
See, Garmin uses bioimpedance, like most home body fat measurement things. It sends a small electrical current through you, and the idea is that the difference in water content between fat and muscle, when plugged into an algorithm will tell you in general what proportions you have of lean mass to fat, etc. Electricity being what it is, it seeks the fastest way to ground, so instead of traveling around your whole body, it just goes up one leg and down the other.
This thing seems to not really know how much water I have in my body. I drink black coffee in the morning, then water the rest of the day. I know I'm well hydrated by looking at my pee. I have none of the signs of even minor dehydration. Yet the Garmin scale will tell me I have something like 49% body water. Some days it even reads lower at night than in the morning, so I got more dehydrated while drinking all day? And that water percentage is how it computes fat, so as it insists I'm shriveling up like a mummy, I'm also gaining massive amounts of body fat.
Bonus round: I somehow gain and lose about half a pound of bone each day. So part of my skeleton is apparently out there doing stuff without the rest of me.
I remembered a pertinent piece of information about myself this morning and refined my search terms, only to come up with threads about my exact problem. Women using this scale find that it hugely overestimates their body fat. One woman saw a big jump in percentages from one day to the next just by switching from her previous brand of scale to the Garmin. Weighing herself on both one morning, the readings were so far from each other as to be laughable. People were weighing in (LOL) to say that rather than actually measuring body fat, it looks like the scale simply uses whole population averages, and spits those out based on your height and weight. Of course, Garmin support keeps shutting these threads down.
I'm considering buying a basic scale at Walmart or something and just sticking it in my bathroom. The nice thing about the Garmin is that it delivers those readings right to my app, but if the information isn't even accurate, why bother? The main thing I need to keep an eye on is my basic overall weight. Especially with summer coming and marathon training beginning soon, I like to make sure that number doesn't drop too sharply, because it means something's wrong. It's also helpful for checking my sweat loss, though Garmin does seem to be good at figuring that one out. It's always lined up pretty tightly with my own observations.
I've been pretty happy with everything else from Garmin that I've ever had, but this scale is a hot mess. And I just got a new Forerunner which I'm super stoked with, so I'm feeling extra-happy about Garmin right now, riding high on improved GPS tracking and more sensitive health monitoring. Except for that stupid scale.
In short, bioimpedance is not really useful for what I need and while it might be good for averaging data over large populations, like BMI, it has limited relevance to individuals trying to track changes in body composition.
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