Omron Body Fat Monitor and Scale
|
Our Price: $39.25 Category: Health Care See more product details |
|---|
(Click here)
Customer Reviews of Omron Body Fat Monitor and Scale
Customer Review: Ditto: Not for athletically fit people
Summary: 2 Stars
I have owned this scale and used it each and every morning under the same circumstances for more than a year now. I have held off writing a review because I wanted to be sure of my opinion based on personal experience. Here it is: The weight scale is consistent with itself. That's all anyone needs is consistency, whether it be plus or minus a .10 or more from another scale. Stick with one scale day to day and you can't go wrong. But the other readings: The Body Fat, the Visceral Fat, the Skeletal Muscle, are crazy wrong for someone who works out six times a week and is athletic, like me. I started out a little over a year ago forty-eight pounds heavier than I am right now. Since I kept a journal each day of all the measurements from the Omron scale, I can say that it is wrong, crazy wrong. During the year I have been in training, working with a trainer and slowly changing my diet, I have gone from obese to slim, trim and have muscles that give me that "ripped" look. But the Omron scale will have none of it. The above mentioned readings have changed only slightly from my starting point, by no more than 2 or 3 percent at best, while my total body weight has dropped roughly 21 percent. I can't believe the body measurements of this scale are anywhere near accurate. I've gone down four pants waist sizes. Where I had a beer gut, I now can look straight down and see my belt buckle without having to suck in. You can see my ribs! I've packed on solid muscle everywhere it is supposed to be: upper and lower body. So this scale is a joke for all but one thing: Giving you your body weight. I'm disappointed I spent the money on it.Customer Review: According to the Omron HBF-500 I am an elite athlete! Because it never worked on me.
Summary: 1 Stars
Let me start of by stating that this will be the first time I ever returned an item to Amazon. Yes, I sometimes get product I am not satisfied with, but I usually give them away. However, not this time, I will not let some poor soul get fooled by this inaccurate piece of ... plastic! I feared that someone might take these readings seriously and become anorexic.
Two trainers (sports medicine and nutritionist majors) measured me at the same time. One measured 16.5% and the other 18%. I bought the Accu-Measure Fitness 3000 Personal Body Fat Tester and it measured 17.5%, heck even the Navy tape measuring system measured 20.1%. The Omron HBF-500 estimates 29%! I read and reread the instructions and I keep getting 26% - 29%. Yes, I get these results seconds apart. I do not expect it to be perfect, but i expect it to be in the ballpark, 11 points is ridiculous. Am I to believe that I am an "athlete" because it clearly states it does not work on athletes? I am in good shape and I do exercise regularly. However, I do not consider myself to be in the same class as a triathlete or any pro athlete. Does this only work on coach potatoes?
By the way, it can't even get weight measurements right. It varies up to 1.8lbs! So how do I know which is right. I would not mind if it was slightly inaccurate, but I do demand consistency. How else am I to track progress? One last rant. The guy pictured on the box looks as if he is in ok shape. Why does it work for him?
Customer Review: HBF-500 is a great BIA scale, but you need to be consistent.
Summary: 5 Stars
The scale works very well, I have been tracking my diet progress and the scale has been invaluable within the limits of bio electric impedance technology. With any BIA scale one must think of the values as relative. If the scale shows a % body fat of 30% you should not assume you have exactly 30% body fat. If, however, you use the scale consistently over 2 weeks and the trend is from 30% to 28% with most days showing a small drop in body fat %, you can be pretty sure that you are losing fat. The reverse would also be true. The numbers can be used to determine if you have stopped losing fat as long as you look at the trend over several days. The day to day numbers will very up and down, it is the trend over several days that is important. The % skeletal muscle and Visceral Fat numbers should also be treated in the same way.
As to using the scale. I found that the numbers fluctuated over the day but if I followed a few rules, the numbers were fairly consistent. I drink a few cups of water before I go to bed and then weight myself first thing in the morning after emptying my bladder. I found that the numbers were consistent over any 3-4 day period.
I also found that the when I modified my workouts to add weightlifting the % skeletal muscle trended up over a week or two.
As long as you don't get hung up on the specific numbers, maintain good hydration the scale will be good for monitoring the trending of your body composition, regardless of age and conditioning. The most important thing is constancy in use.
Customer Review: excellent scale, bogus fat monitor
Summary: 3 Stars
I have been using this device for 2 years now. The good about this tool is scale that is extremely precise and gives 100% reproducible results.
As for body fat monitor, I believe it is a bogus. According to the description, they run some low-voltage electricity through your legs and compute fat level based on that. But here is my personal experience. I lost over 50 pounds within a year, and logged my mass and fat percentage daily. Body fat was reducing together with my mass, which is very predictable.
Once I was 150 pounds I made a simple experiment and measured my body fat while holding 2 20-pound dumb-bells in my hands. Since the current is run through your legs, you would not expect that these weights in my hands would affect the reading, but the tool displayed my body fat number PRECISELY the same as I had when I was 190 pound. In other words, this number is not really measured, it is just calculated based on your height (which you entered in the profile) and your measured mass.
To confirm my conclusion another way, I used Microsoft Excel and drew a graph of dependency between my mass and body fat percentage as shown by the scale. The line appeared ideally straight which is only possible if one number is derived from another rather than measured independently.
The bottom line here is: if you just want excellent scale for this price, it is a good choice, but don't count on body fat measurement.
Customer Review: Good compromise of durability, cost and featureset
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this scale after quite a bit of research and reading the reviews here. It seemed to be the best compromise of affordability, durability and featureset such as the automatic recording of values for a 3 month period. It doesn't actually show you values for every day in the period though. What it does it show you your last values for the 7 day, 30 day and 90 day mark and these rotate to the next value contained internally as you record another measurement.
I also thought I would wait until after the 'honeymoon' period you always have with a 'new toy' before writing my review just in case I got a troublesome unit initially. I have had it nearly 6 months now and it has so far proved durable and consistent. I got it to measure a trend rather than be the last word in accuracy although of course you certainly don't want it to be inaccurate. You do need to make sure that you use it at the same time of day for consistency when using the record feature. The one feature it does lack is the body hydration measurement which would've proved useful as it was my understanding that the bodyfat measurement can change according to how hydrated you are regardless of current weight. It has 4 slots for measurement records which is more than enough for my wife and myself and I like the guest feature which allows friends etc to use it for a one time use without having to use up a valuable slot. So far I have no complaints with this purchase.