For Christmas I got a high-speed, low-drag ANT+ Tanita scale that measures just about every metric you can imagine that it’s possible to measure through the soles of your feet.  Which, trust me, is more metrics than you can imagine.  It connects to my Garmin and then uploads to Garmin Connect.

I’m not really much interested in my weight per se – I think the last time I cared about my weight was for intramural boxing at West Point.  To me athletic performance goals are better indicators of progress or achievement.  If I was going to track a physical attribute as an indicator of health or performance it would probably be body composition (which also get’s tracked by the scale but which I assume is skewed by the collection method).

Regardless, I use the scale because I like collecting random data and studies have shown that people who weigh themselves daily (I’m not that consistent, a couple times a week is the best I do) tend to maintain healthier body weights and better overall health than those who don’t.  Plus graphs!

A couple interesting things from this data:

1) All the data values are within a pretty tight range on the Y-axis so the variations are probably not statistically significant.

2) However, both my body fat percentage and my metabolic age indicators began an upward trend on or around 4-20, which is when I fell off the wagon and my workouts went inconsistent.

3) Lastly, I’d like to highlight that according to my scale I have a metabolic age of 20 years (and in the early weeks of April I was only 13-18 years old!).  Based on that mostrecent metabolic age information and the Social Security Administration’s life expectancy calculator there appears to be a good chance that I’ll live until I’m [does math] 134-years old.

So I’ve got that going for me.