Overall balance scale is for weight loss min-maxers

Lately, I've had my eyeball on all of the various gadgets and gizmos that come through the pipe, promising to help me — a repulsive fatty whose recent attempts at exercise most aptly resemble a greased walrus flapping on his belly after a fish suspended above a treadmill — measure the exact atomic rate at which my blubber is increasing or subsiding.

Okay. I'm not really that bad. I'm about half way through losing about 30 pounds. But the min-maxer in me is fascinated by ultra-precise fat measuring devices like National Electric's Overall Balance Scale. It measures your weight. It measures your muscle level. It measures your basal metabolic rate. It measures your BMI (bullshit). Hell, it measures your subcutaneous fat ratio... as opposed to exocutaneous fat ratio, which are the planetoid-sized masses of cellulite orbiting around your own personal gravity well, along with a set of planetary rings made up of Cheetos and Ding-Dongs.

Too fat to see the numbers on the scale over your belly? They've thought of that, though not too well: you can pull the sensor up above your belly, which would all be fine although it presumes you can actually reach down to touch your toes, which is clearly impossible if you can't see over your stomach to begin with.

Pretty neat, but my experience over the last month getting in shape has been that the more precise the numbers being thrown at me are, the more neurotic I become about them. I'd be tearing my hair out in bloody clumps at the hopelessness of the cause and consoling myself with a pepperoni pizza after a few hours with a scale this precise.

Overall Balance Scale fights dreaded “metabo” [Trends in Japan]