The Holidays Are Over! The Holidays Are Over!

by Michael Fruchtman, CFO

The holidays are coming and that means food, food, and more food. It also means getting on the scale and feeling terrible frustration with the added weight. Each pound added feels like a betrayal to your body.

Now there’s a new way to look at it! A new “scale” called a SHAPA. This scale doesn’t tell you if you’ve gained pounds or lost them because, according to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, weight is a metric of the past and doesn’t tell you anything. Weight can vary by as much as three pounds throughout the day. Watching weight tells us nothing about overall well-being.

When you see your weight go up two pounds, you assume you’ve done something wrong. When you see your weight go down two pounds, you assume you’ve done something right. Most of the time, you haven’t done anything at all. It’s confusing and demotivating.

The SHAPA scale is a “smart scale.” It captures bone density and muscle mass in addition to overall weight and it connects to your phone.   It analyzes all the information about your body and tells you either you’re doing fine or you’re not. It does it on a 5 point scale. A little better, a little worse, much better, much worse or basically the same. It watches your body over a three-week period and compares it and really, isn’t that what you want to know after all?

The scale isn’t cheap. $129 with a year-long subscription to the app for $10 per month but there’s no demotivating poundage reported. Seems like a great idea to me!