I "upgraded" scale, my immersion blender broke, and more

Gear updates.

As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite gauge of daily progress when losing weight is a boring old scale.

In short, my reasons are:

1. Body weight is much less noisy day-to-day than waist circumference (for me)

2. I can pretty reliably judge trends within a week to 30 days, sometimes even within days

3. Even DEXA scans are pretty noisy, we just don’t notice it because we can’t do them every day

Of course people are somewhat right that weight doesn’t tell the whole story: we could be losing muscle instead of fat weight, or gaining muscle while losing fat, or retain more water.

But all other methods seem worse to me. Waist circumference is 5-10x noisier on a day-to-day basis. Sure, I could use a rolling average. But why? And it still only measures, well, your waist circumference. There was a solid month where I lost a lot of weight in the legs, but not the waist. Circumference didn’t move, but I went down a jeans size and had to buy a new pair.

To make sure I don’t lose muscle, and get a general impression of lean/fat mass, I get a DEXA scan once in a while to supplement the scale weight.

Ol’ Reliable

When I started experimenting with weight loss last year, I went to The Wirecutter and bought their recommended bathroom scale. I’ve had mixed results with buying what they recommend, but I have gotten really good results on occasion.

At the time, they were recommending the Etekcity scale, which sells for $20 on Amazon. And honestly, it’s a fine scale.

$20 Etekcity scale

It’s pretty consistent, it’s easy to use, it’s cheap as hell, it’s sturdy.

As of literally yesterday, they updated their article and are now recommending a different scale. I haven’t tried that one, but I’m sure it’s fine too.

The one downside, as I documented at the time: it’s not really accurate to 1/10th of a pound like its display would suggest. It can really only do .7lb increments. So you’ll always end up on .3 of a certain poundage, or .7 of another. This caused me to simply disregard the decimal as it was more likely to be bogus than useful.

It was somewhat annoying around the edges, though: around 1/3 the time you were in that weird territory where the scale would insist on a .7 decimal, but you knew it was really lower or higher than that. Not a big deal, but annoying.

Must Buy a New Gadget

So when somebody on Twitter posted a picture of a ridiculously industrial-looking shipping scale, of course I had to buy it.

$50 Accuteck shipping scale

I mean, just look at the name:

Accuteck 440lb Heavy Duty Digital Metal Industry Shipping Postal Scale W/C

Heavy Duty? Metal Industry? Shipping Postal Scale? Shut up and take my money! (I don’t know what W/C stands for.)

It claims to come in “assorted colors,” but the only color I could find was blue.

The main feature besides the warehouse look: it claims to be accurate to 0.05lb or 50g. Interestingly, 0.05lb is 22g by my calculation. But never mind.

“You want to experience true level, Morty? Do you?”

Of course, first thing, I had to check if this was true. So I repeated the test from my original post.

To briefly repeat the test procedure:

1. Step on scale

2. Drink 100g of water

3. Goto 1

4. Repeat a total of 10 times

Because it was just as easy, I stepped on both the Accuteck and the Etekcity scale each time, to get a comparison. The Etekcity performed exactly like last time.

(What did I use to weigh 100g of water? My kitchen scale. Did I test the kitchen scale? No. It’s getting so meta..)

Scale showdown

Well, huh. While the blue Etekcity goes up every once in a while, showing the same stair pattern as last time, the red Accuteck line is.. complicated?

It sure did have less of a stair pattern. But it also seems to go down after making a big jump. I guess it’s closer to the yellow, theoretically optimal, line on average. So that’s a win.

I did notice that its weight changes quite a bit even depending on how you stand on the scale. E.g. standing in the very center vs. on the edges. Even taking a heavy breath while standing on it makes it move.

So, did I really upgrade my scale? Maybe. It certainly looks cool and industrial. Is the extra accuracy helpful for weight loss? Probably not. Is $50 a terrible amount of money to waste? No.

I quit measuring my waist again

After I posted about the scale, some people claimed that waist circumference was a much better measurement, and that I should try again. Just for the sake of it, I did measure my waist every morning for a couple months.

It’s still noisy as heck. Check this out.

Red: scale weight. Blue: waist circumference.

The blue waist circumference graph is, again, typically 5x more noisy. Day-to-day swings of 5-6cm are common. Meanwhile, the scale weight rarely changes by more than 1lb a day, at least while I stay on the diet.

There’s a weird swing in the beginning, where the blue line is always beneath the red one, and then it suddenly switches. I was using a different tape measure there and it broke, so I replaced it. The first one I had was one of those specifically made for body measurement:

I replaced it with just a regular tape measure, like a tailor would use. I don’t know which one of the two was off by 2 inches/5cm. More importantly, they were both equally noisy day-to-day so that I could not infer a useful trend.

Of course measuring your waist will give you a better overall impression of your health/fat levels than merely measuring your weight. But figuring out that I’m obese is not the issue I have.

What I’m looking for in a scale (or any tool) is for it to give me consistent feedback if my diet is working.

So I quit measuring my waist again.

My cheapo immersion blender broke

After over half a year of daily use whipping heavy cream, the cheapo immersion blender I bought off Amazon broke. I think it was $40 when I bought it.

It did a fine enough job of whipping cream, but I thought I might get something more reliable this time. So I checked out The Wirecutter on immersion blenders.

Their #1 pick was $130 and just kind of looked.. weird. So I went for their budget pick at $65.

Big mistake. The low-trim Braun immersion blender had such little power I had trouble getting my cream whipped to a solid consistency. The buttons were so hard to press that my fingers would go numb. Not cool.

So I ended up buying the higher-trim Braun blender. It has double the power of the little one, which yields very nice whipped cream. It also comes with a pistol grip style trigger, and so it’s very comfortable to hold throughout the process.

I guess I should’ve spent the big money up front. Oh well.

By the way, I use a stainless steel milkshake cup to whip my cream in.

Reasons:

• If I was going to do this every day, I might as well enjoy it.

• The narrow bottom combined with an immersion blender allows me to make relatively small portions of 150-300g at a time, unlike a larger bowl.

• I store it in the freezer, so it’s really cold when I whip cream. This helps with the whipping.

• If I was going to use it every day, I didn’t want to ingest tiny pieces of plastic from the regular blender cup.

• It feels kind of cool to use an old-school milkshake cup.

Nitrous-oxide cream dispenser

A while ago, a reader recommended I try one of these. It sounds super cool: you put your heavy cream into a metal bottle, screw the lid on, and insert a nitrous-oxide cartridge. Then you shake the whole thing, and out comes perfectly dispensed whipped cream!

The problem is, I couldn’t ever get a reliable consistency. I’d shake and it’d come out all liquid. Shake more, and suddenly there’s butter inside and nothing comes out. Every single video on YouTube showed people shaking it differently, from literally 2 seconds to 30 seconds of vigorous shaking. Even doing the same thing 3x in a row didn’t yield consistent results for me. Plus, you have to buy single-use cartridges, 1 for every pint you whip.

The problem is you just can’t see the current consistency. If I use the immersion blender, I can see that it’s still a bit runny, and give it another 10 seconds. You can’t see inside the dispenser bottle, so you have to guess.

All-Clad makes a really great pan

Similar to my blender, at one point my trusty Cuisinart sauce pan got sketchy. After cleaning it, water would collect under the rivets that fastened the handle to the pot. When I put it on the stove and it got hot, the water would turn into steam and make weird whistling noises as it escaped.

I’ve had one such rivet explode on me me years ago, from a different pan. It flew through the kitchen like a bullet. Luckily, nobody got hurt. So once the Cuisinart started acting up, I decided to replace it.

The All-Clad 3qt sauce pan is great. It’s very pricey for a sauce pan at $120, but it cooks noticeably better than any other sauce pan I’ve ever used, and it’s easier to clean, too. And I since I make the exact same meal every day, I use it daily. Plus it has a sweet polished steel look.

The 3qt size is perfect for making the ex150 meal. The pan melts butter easily without burning it, and it creates an amazing sear on my ground beef. I’ve cooked with other pans in the meantime, and it’s just not even close. I always miss the All-Clad when I cook at other places.

So that’s it in terms of gear for now. Maybe this helps you if you’re looking for some cookware. I’m honestly not usually one to go for fancy, high quality cookware, but the milkshake cup and pan I do love.