I’ve become a big fan of Withings over the last 12 months, absolutely gushing over their ScanWatch and also have been using the sleep tracking mat for the last 12 months, but even though I have known the brand for their smart scales, which they were first to market with, I haven’t had a chance to try them until now.
The Body Comp and Body Scan are the company’s brand new scales and whilst they look like your regular set of scales, they go far beyond what I thought was ever possible in this form-factor.
The Body Comp in particular really covers all areas of health and fitness, and seems like a great investment if you’re somebody that wants to continue to check in on your health over a long period of time.
The scale recommends that you stand on it at roughly the same time each day with as little clothes as possible (or at least the same amount of clothes). It can then measure your weight in a basic format, but then give you a really great look at your overall body composition. It breaks your body percentages down into bone mass, muscle mass, fat mass and water mass.
THE CHEAPEST PRICE: BODY SMART – $199 & BODY COMP – $359
Both the Body Comp and Body Smart are accurate within 50g of your weight, and can hold the data of up to eight different users, which is uses your weight to identify and add to the correct person. This was hugely important as every time a family member or friend entered my bathroom, they obviously stood on the scales, and this would make it impossible if not for the super intelligent auto identifying system.
Both scales have have 2.8-inch high res colour screen and makes it really easy to get the data. There’s also a range of features in app including an eyes down mode if you’re not wanting to see your weight every day and a bunch of other great accessibility features.
Whilst it doesn’t seem like a lot is changing day to day, the Withings app does a really good job of telling you how things are changing over days, weeks and months, so for instance, it does a really great job of telling you if your weight is trending up or down, or stale and if you’re losing fat or gaining muscle, so if you’re somebody with a fitness goal in mind, it really takes the guesswork out of that.
There are other measurements such as your basal metabolic rate, which I had heard of, but wouldn’t know what it meant in relation to my own personal health journey, but the app does a really good job of breaking down how each measurement is taken and can have an impact on your fitness journey.
The other really important part that the Body Comp scale plays into your long-term health is by taking a number of key cardiovascular health measurements.
These measurements include a vascular age, which the scale will give you after a number of measurements, your standing heart rate which is measured every time you step on the scales, and also your visceral fat which is a measurement of how much fat is around your key organs.
The Body Comp can also measure your nerve health by measuring sweat gland stimulation in your feet. This takes a little bit longer (roughly 30 days) to give you an accurate reading, but it will give you a predicted score after a few weight-ins.
There’s another measurement called Pulse Velocity which seems to be only available in the EU at this point (I assume Australia and US have stricter health regulations), but that seems like a measurement I’d be keen to see as well.
I was left consistently wondering how accurate these measurements were, but I also wasn’t super bothered, as it was consistently making me thinking about how I can better myself from a fitness point of view, and consistently putting me in the frame of mind that little changes every day can make big changes long-term.
There seems to be a lot of great stuff built into the Withings+ service where you can set goals, get an overall health improvement score and access programmes, but this is a paid service of $14.99 a month or $149.99 a year, which is a big add-on to a $360 scale, but if you’re somebody who thinks they’ll get use out of it, it seems like it’d be genuinely helpful.
For most people, the $199 Body Smart scale will be a great starting point. It has a lot of the same great features as the Body Comp including the accurate weight composition metrics as well as visceral fat and standing heart rate, but is missing the vascular age and nerve health score features.
In this age where knowledge is power, and we have these incredibly accurate devices on our wrists that measure things such as sleep and heart rate and steps, it really does seem like a missed opportunity not to have a smart scale in your house, and based on ease of use and how much of a joy these are to use, I’d highly recommend them.
