I recently received the new FitBit Aria Wifi Smart Scale and wanted to do a quick video to share my thoughts on it so far with you guys.
I tried to keep it to 3 minutes but went a little over! It’s 5 minutes and 40 seconds 🙂
Here’s the Video:
CLICK HEREÂ to download a PDF transcript of the review.
Rather read the review? Here it is!
Hey guys! What’s going on? It’s Tim from www.RenegadeDad.net and what you are looking at here is the FitBit Aria WiFi Scale and this is a really cool device. I just got this and I have been playing around with it.
The reason I like it so much is it not only measures your weight but also measures your body fat percentage and I am a huge believer that monitoring your weight alone is a pretty bad idea; it doesn’t give you a real good gauge on whether your diet or exercise regimen is really helping you or not because weight can really fluctuate up or down significantly depending on how much water you are retaining or not and a variety of factors can influence how much water you are retaining or not.
So, I really like to look at body fat percentage. I track my weight and my body fat percentage over time and look at diet and exercise and try to optimize my program to reduce fat and to gain muscle or at least retain muscle. You don’t really don’t want to lose anything other than fat or excess water. So, I think looking at body fat is a key metric that you want to track if you are trying to improve your health or lose weight or gain weight, whatever you are trying to do, it’s really a key metric to track and this scale allows you to do that really quickly and really easily and I am a big fan of quick and easy.
So, basically, all you have to do is step on the scale – and as soon as you step on it, it begins to read your weight. So, once it calculates your weight – it looks like it just got it – then it calculates your body fat percentage – looks like it just captured that as well.
Oh, I forgot to mention that another really cool feature is that you can have up to 8 people use this scale. So, if there are multiple people in your household, you can set up multiple people to use this scale and when you step on it, the scale can tell who it is based on the weight and if the scale gets confused, you actually just tap the scale with your foot to indicate which person it is and I don’t know if you saw that before but it came up with my initials on the scale.
So, each user that might be using this would set up their account with their initials. And then basically what happens is the scale uploads your body fat and weight to the FitBit portal which you sign up for when you get this scale and you put your information there and then basically all you have to do is step on the scale and it reads your weight and your body fat and it uploads that information to your own account on the FitBit portal which alone is really cool because you can enter in what you eat and you can enter in your activity and all that kind of good stuff.
So, it’s really cool. I really like it because it’s super quick and easy. It’s a real convenient way to measure and keep track of your body fat and your weight.
The one thing I am not super excited about it is that the body fat percentage seems to be a bit high. Now, every device you use to measure body fat will vary slightly or maybe even significantly; this one happens to vary significantly from some other tools that I use to measure body fat.
I have used Bod Pod Machine and also a device by BodyMetrix that actually uses ultrasound to measure body fat and both of those devices are regarded as highly accurate. The Bod Pod Machine is something used at the Columbine to measure body fat percentage. Those two devices come in pretty darn close when I get my body fat measure with them but this one seems to be a bit high.
Update: After creating the video I contacted FitBit support and found out that I had to change one of the settings on the FitBit scale to give me an accurate body fat percentage measurement. More on this to come in a full detailed review soon.
The thing I would say about that though is that when you measure body fat, you want to use the same device consistently. You don’t want to switch devices because they can vary.
So, if you are using this device and this device alone, it should give you a really good idea as to whether your body fat is moving up or moving down over time and that’s really what you want to know; you want to know if your diet and exercise routine are moving you in the right direction or the wrong direction to help you make adjustments.
So, that’s pretty much it. It’s a really cool scale, it weighs about 6 pounds, so it’s light, it looks pretty cool, it also comes in black and I dig it. It’s a nice, quick and easy way to measure your weight and your body fat and keep track of it without having to do much else other than step on it.
So, that’s it. If you guys have any questions about it, let me know, come to the website RenegadeDad.Net and send me questions. I’ll put a post up with a little bit more detail about the scale.
If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on the website or on Twitter or on Facebook and yeah, come check it out. And if you want to see some other product reviews, come on over to the site and check this out as well, I will be continuously updating those on www.RenegadeDad.net and hope you guys have a great day.
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