FJ's Verdict:

I’ve always said that if you aren’t tracking your progress, then you suck. Because you are aiming in the dark… and you will most likely miss horribly. There are many variables that you can track and I suggest you track as many as you can until shit starts to get too complicated. But for those that are still hesitant, I think you should keep a handle on 3 basic variables at the minimum. These are: Your weight, Your daily caloric intake & Your workout progress. For those that want to take everything further, you can keep track of macronutrient ratios, body fat percentage, one rep maximums etc.

Today though, we are going to look at a product that helps you track one of those important three factors: weight! Now a normal $20 bathroom scale is usually sufficient, but this is the 21st century, so we need to step up our game! When it comes to technology… I’m truly all for it. This high tech scale is called BodyTrace.

Product Name: BodyTrace Internet Scale
Company: BodyTrace
MSRP: $59.99 OR $9.99 with subscription plan
Availability: Low (Online Website(s) only)
Warranty: 1 Year

So what’s so special about this scale? Well first of all it’s fully digital, which means you can measure your weight accurately to the tenth. Now you might think that this type of accuracy is an overkill, but when you see that you’ve dropped from 165.8 pounds to 165.2 in a single day… you know you did some WORK – which is always good.

Official Description & Product Claims

The BodyTrace eScale and Website is a complete package for all of you who take their health seriously. By tracking your weight you can ensure a healthy lifestyle and your fitness or weight loss goals can be achieved in an efficient way.

The eScale is a bathroom scale that wirelessly uploads and displays your weight & BMI at the BodyTrace Website.

First Impressions

After I received the box, I was glad to see that adequate foam protection was used to keep the scale safe and everything visually looked solid… at least for the time being (more on that in a minute). The scale itself is very elegant with the glass top and thick border. It’s just got this high tech look to it and will fit nicely in almost any bathroom, or room for that matter.

It’s powered by six AA batteries and the display readouts are in bright red. I would have preferred if the scale came with a removable/rechargeable battery pack but on the plus side, batteries are included and they do last for quite a while. I’ve been using this for months and it’s still going on the original 6 I got in the mail so that’s always a good thing. Although this scale literally works out of the box without any configuration needed, it would have been nice to receive a user manual. This is the first product I’ve seen that doesn’t come with one… which I found very, very odd (to their partial credit, the website does have an on-line manual but that feels like corner-cutting to me).

When your scale ships, you are also sent an email that takes you to the site and allows you to set up your online profile (which is private and protected by a password so don’t worry, no one will know how overweight you are). This will allow you to log in and track your progress using charts and other tasty numbers.

Your scale is automatically pre-configured when it ships… the whole system works beautifully together without any hassle. Awesome Sauce. (On a side note, if their proprietary online software doesn’t float your boat, BodyTrace also syncs up with DailyBurn. Just email BodyTrace and they will help you set it all up within minutes… even more awesome sauce!)

Now when you think of an “internet scale”, you’re probably thinking that it requires an internet connection… in this case, wifi. But you’d be wrong. This scale uses cellphone GSM technology to submit data to your online profile. In my opinion, this is a decent choice because you can pretty much use this scale anywhere in the world and if your internet is down, you don’t have to worry about it NOT working since cellphone towers have extremely rare failure rates.

However, I WOULD have preferred that it came with a wifi option. I think BodyTrace should sell a top of the line scale which has wifi + GSM and a normal scale with just GSM to let the user decide (I’ll talk about why below).

So how much does this new age fitness gadget cost? Well there are 2 ways to go about it:

1. You can buy the scale outright for $59.99 and with it you will get one year free subscription to the online tracking software ($5.99/month thereafter).

2. If the first option doesn’t suit you (or if you’re strapped for cash), you can pay just $9.99 for the scale but you need to commit to a one year contract ($9.99/month). Once the contract expires, the cost of the online tracking software is the same as the first option – $5.99/month.

Overall I think this is quite reasonable and pretty damn flexible since competing scales that use only WiFi cost well over $100.

Using The Scale

My experience with the BodyTrace scale started as a bumpy ass ride. When my scale first came, it seemed to work fine. All I had to do was tap it to turn it on, wait for itself to zero, step on it and viola! It took my weight and instantly sent it to my online profile, but after a few days it started showing a bunch of errors and shit. Then when it did work, it couldn’t get a cell reception and/or would not send the data to the online profile.

Being a curious little monkey that I am, I just opened up the sucker and found that the PCB had come lose, so I popped it in and everything was gravy… but only for a few days. Then the scale just went bust. Every time I turned it on, it was frozen with some stupid error… my friend said I was too fat for it. What an asshole, hurt my feelings and shit. Anyways, the good news is that the customer support at BodyTrace is top-fucking-notch. They didn’t hesitate, haggle or ask me too many questions, they just rushed me a brand new scale and didn’t even ask for the old one back! Respectable.

We weren’t able to figure out what the exact problem was with the old one, but BodyTrace did insist that every scale is thoroughly tested before it’s sent out and that my problem was the first of it’s kind. Fair enough. The new scale arrived in like 2 days and worked a whole lot better.

I found myself stepping on the scale wayy more often that I would have with my original bathroom contraption because I loved the way I could visually see my progress (or in my case, the maintenance phase). The online profile is also very easy to use, and works really well when viewed on the ipad or any cellphone browser. I did however have a few complaints: first, you cannot upload a custom avatar, you have to pick from a specified group. This is odd because you CAN upload pictures of yourself to see how you’re coming along. Second (and this is huge) is the macronutrient ratio suggestions. Jokingly, I had made my goal 200lbs and the nutrient recommendation I got was absurd, take a look…

Don’t get me wrong, this type of carb/protein ratio will get me to 200lbs but I’ll be fat as fuck. A ratio of 4:1 is unacceptable and this needs to be fixed because people will follow it and will look softer than a Tellytubby.

Third, there is no ability to manually add your data should the reception or data sending fail. The software has the ability to remove measurements but from my experience, I found that the system was smart enough to not need this option (more on that below). Other than these quirks, the online thingamajig is recommended.

Now let’s visit the core technology of this scale – GSM. Because there is a SIM card in the scale, it will (just like any regular cellphone) lose reception depending on the placement in your home. While there is no official signal strength indicator, the scale does say “ERR CELL” when reception is lost and I found that the basement and rooms with thick walls were problematic.

So what happens when the scale has no reception? Well what it does is store your last recorded weight into memory and the next time you use it with a reception, it will send along the previously memorized data in order. It’s a nifty feature in theory but I found that it only worked 60% of the time… which is why I think this scale would benefit hugely with a WiFi connection as a backup.

False Negatives

One feature which did work well was the scale’s ability to omit odd fluctuations and false negatives. After using it for a few weeks, I guess the scale “knew” me quite well. One day I decided to fuck with it and put my friend on it (who is 30lbs heavier). While the scale itself didn’t behave any differently, the online software was smart enough to detect this odd fluctuation and it never showed up on my progress graph, keeping my record un-harmed. Nice.

This feature will come in very handy when there is more than one person living in the house and they want to check their weight everything now and then.

Conclusion

I like how the BodyTrace is so easy to use right outta the box, but it isn’t without its quirks. The thing desperately needs wifi, there is occasional loss of reception (could be because I’m in Canada), the online nutrition suggestions are a bit whack and most annoying of all is that even when you do have reception, it sometimes fails to send the data (not sure you can blame this one on my location… it’s not like I’m in Yukon). 

On the other hand, the online tracking software is smart enough to omit useless fluctuations, has a food tracker and will allow you to post pictures, links and notes, will allow syncing with twitter (should you choose) and works nicely on portable devices such as the iPad or a smartphone.

Then there is the fact that it’s reasonably priced and has some really honest people backing the product. I’ve had quite a few email exchanges with the President and I can confidently say that you’ll be in good hands. The customer service that you get on the back end is just as important as the product itself. The overall product experience is pretty good.

So taking everything into consideration, I’m giving the BodyTrace an overall 3.8 stars out of 5. The beauty of online software is that feature updates can be applied within weeks and should things improve, so will this rating.

[UPDATE]: BodyTrace confirmed that the scale is only sold in the USA for proper GSM coverage and that I was a special case (duh!). So while the reception in Canada was off and on, potential US buyers should know that reception problems and data loss in their region is rare. To me, this makes sense and props to BodyTrace for clearing that up as quickly as they did. They are also looking into the software feature updates I mentioned so let’s see what happens.

Cheers.

- FitJerk

Originally Written By FitJerk for www.fitjerk.com – © 2010 All Rights Reserved – This post is NOT to be republished without author consent. If you are reading this on any other site besides www.fitjerk.com , then it has been stolen!

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