The Best Gadgets For Losing Weight
I’m in a bit of a… philosophical mood. During the last hour at work, the drive home, the time spent washing my car, and that 15 minutes I was watching the history channel prove once more that UFO’s did in fact crash in Roswell, I spent time thinking about my life over this year. 2011 held a lot of big changes for me. I started investing in the stock market, I got a speech easy device, started the career I’ve been desperately wanting over the past 3 years, obtained a loan for a very cool sports car on my own credit, no cosigner. Started a website, got my first speeding ticket, dated a supermodel, and recently started losing weight. Okay okay, one of those isn’t true. I would never get a speeding ticket. 
From that long list changes, the weight loss is the one I felt like blogging about today.
As many people know, I’m a pretty big gadget guy. Video games, electronics, technology in general, these things are my passion. Eating right, getting exercise, staying healthy, these things are not. So anything you can do to cross the bridge from one to the other (like Wii Fit! Gotta love Wii Fit), or at least anything you can do to make the weight loss stuff easier, is very much appreciated. I spent the last month or so loading up on gadgets for losing weight. I’m happy to report that I’m down about 10lbs so far, and I wanted to share with you my favorites that I think have really helped me so far.
My favorite is the one I like to call the mother of all scales (or MOAS for short, and not to be confused with the incorrect plural form of Moa, which is an extinct flightless bird). Does your scale tell you your body weight? I’m sure it does, otherwise it’s not really a scale. What else does it do? Probably nothing, except if you’re lucky it looks good on the floor so you keep it there rather than pulling out of the closet for every use. The Withings Scale not only measures body weight, but it also accurately measures the percentage of body fat and lean mass in your body. Many scales can show you in the last 2 months you’ve lost, say, 15 pounds total. The Withings scale shows you you lost 15 pounds total, but 20 pounds of body fat and you gained 5 pounds of lean mass (that’s the stuff you want, FYI).
If that was all it did, it’s still impressive, but there’s more. It connects to Wifi, automatically updates your profile on their website or any of these other websites when you stand on it, supports up to 8 different users, recognizes who is who on it’s own, and gives you the power to look back at the history of the different users and analyze losses or gains more accurately and effectively. Oh yeah, it also looks pretty sexy. I keep mine out on the floor. 
Of course you can’t expect to lose weight if you just stand on it every morning and don’t change anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a scale that sucked the fat out of you the longer you stood on it? I’ve been using mine in conjunction with Runkeeper. I have the Runkeeper app on my phone that that tracks my route, heart rate (through a third party heart rate monitor), speed, and calories burned. It uses the information given to it every morning by my scale and keeps my profile updated with the correct weight and BMI, which it then uses to determine just how many calories I burned. It’s all quite fascinating really. 20 years ago to track all this information i’d have to spend more time logging data then I would actually running. Now with the help of Withings and Runkeeper, I just stand on my scale in the morning, (after I pee of course, full bladder = more weight and that’s no bueno) press ‘start activity’ on Runkeeper right before I begin, and [try to] enjoy the run!
