Day Six: Woke up late

Wt: somewhere in the neighborhood of 164-165 lbs.
Ketosis: moderate.

We've been using a Withings scale to keep track of weight loss on the diet. It's beautiful, fancy, wirelessly connected to the internet, and not at all cheap. We bought it expressly for this weight loss effort, to make it all that much more involved and fun.

So you step on the scale in the morning, the gorgeous, thin, glossy blue-black smooth-surfaced scale. It weighs you, takes an estimate of your body fat by bioelectric impedance measurement, and calculates your body mass index. It then sends all of this information to their website, where you can log in and look at pretty graphs of your fat decreasing in time, obsessing over every data point to your heart's content. If there are multiple users of the scale it automatically recognizes which one you are and sends your data to the right place. It is remarkably good at this. KCA stepped on it the other day; her weight and mine are only a few pounds different, but the scale correctly decided that she wasn't me. On the downside, it then refused to take her measurements. It's not a scale anybody can just step on and use. It has standards.

It's also a bit high strung in how it takes measurements even of people it knows. I stepped on it multiple times this morning and got returns ranging from 164.7 (depressing) to 164.2 (better, but still not lower than my happy Thursday weight of 163.6). I ran a bunch of side-by-side trials of the Withings vs. JRS's old scale that I've been using happily for years now. The old one, while not as pretty and unable to talk to the internets, is much more consistent in its measurements (also weighs about a pound less; but that's a calibration issue).

I generally prefer the work horse over the race horse (plus, have a history with it). But it's really nice to be able to see graphs without ever writing down a thing. An added benefit from the Withings website is the ability to download the data to a spreadsheet, so you can do what you like with it. This is particularly useful as their website has some design issues, namely the inability to look at points on the graph that are too close together (they also have an iPhone app that is very nice and doesn't have this problem).

I'm simultaneously keeping track of everything eaten on SparkPeople.com, and in the end will hopefully be able to look into how and on what time scales weight loss responds to consumption of calories, fats, carbs, etc.

Interesting side note: after playing with both scales for a while this morning, I finally took a shower. Stepped on both again after the shower - hair still wet - and had miraculously lost more than a pound!! It had been a while since my last shower, but I didn't realize dirt could weigh that much.