27 January 2022
One of the most common New Year’s resolutions people make is around losing weight and as many use a scale to track their progress, what better time to test the Beurer Heavy Duty Diagnostic Scale?
The Beurer Heavy Duty Diagnostic Scale goes far beyond the standard mechanical scale, helping to track BMI, body fat percentage, body water, and more. Superior tracking doesn’t come cheap, however, so is the scale worth the extra outlay?
We sent the scale out to our tester, John, to find out his thoughts. We asked him to use the scales every day for a fortnight over the Christmas period, to get a real feel for how the scales worked.
The first impressions of the scale were very positive. The box it came in looked and felt sturdy – the scales were well protected. The packaging was smart, professional, and had clear text on the front.
Theses scales are available in a variety of languages, meaning the back of the box looked a little more complicated. However, what was in English didn’t give much more information than the front of the box.
With so many features, the manual for the scales looked to be quite thick, which at first sight might be daunting, but only pages 9 to 15 are in English, so it’s not quite as dense as it first appeared.
It’s important not to give up on the manual though as if you just get on the scales to see what it does, they’ll only measure your weight, so you need to persevere with setting up all the information.
Day 2
After testing them on multiple surfaces around the house – concrete, tiles, wooden floor, lino, carpet – recording on carpet (the photo on the left) was about 3 stone lighter than a wooden surface. These scales definitely need to be a used on a hard floor.
Day 6
I realised today that the scales had changed to P10 (a different user profile) and looking back had been since day 4.
Day 7
No matter what I did today, I could only get “Err2” on the screen. There is no mention of Err2 in the manual and nothing that really made sense online. I let the scales turn off several times but could not get rid of Err2.
Having spent an hour trying and researching, I gave up for the day.
Day 8
I removed the batteries, reset everything and now I weigh 21 stone! This could be “Christmas weight” but it seems a big jump from Day 6. This is very frustrating!
Day 10
No change in weight, but I realised the scale had changed back to P10 again, in fact, it changed on Day 9. Is it something I am doing wrong? Tomorrow I am going to look at the manual again and do exactly what it says!
Day 12
I’ve set up a very clear routine in my mind: press ‘Set’ first and then get on. Previously, I may have sometimes pressed ‘Set’ after getting on (as it didn’t seem to matter to the weight) but this may have been a mistake.
I’m only a pound down on yesterday, so everything seems OK.
Day 15
Back to my Day 12 and 13 weight, so I seem to be keeping pretty consistent. My careful routine is working.
This scale came in at the right time because I am concerned about my weight at the moment. I’ve just started seeing the practice nurse at my doctors over diet and I’m diabetic as well, so it does have some useful features there for me in the longer term.
Obviously you didn’t want the trial to go on forever, but I don’t think it’s particularly good to weigh yourself every day. Equally, the rest of the figures didn’t really change much at all. Over that short intensive period the information wasn’t particularly useful every day, but certainly over a longer period it’s going to help me, I think, quite a bit. Not just the weight will become a target but things like my BMI. I’ve always been aware that my BMI is high, that will be a target which I can get from the scales as well, as will the body fat as well, so there definitely are some numbers on the scales that will be useful, longer term.
I’m going to go on using the scales long term and I guess the problems really were of my own making. I’m retired now but I was both a scientist and a maths teacher for a long time, so I should’ve known really better than just try and cut corners.
I’m in the routine now, it works, and I’m pleased with the results. I’d like it to be a bit more consistent but again I just happened to find an app on my phone which records the weight and it also this one records a graph and records the trend line. That as a maths teacher it makes complete sense to me. The trend at the moment is going up, which OK, it’s been Christmas, so I’ll look at that trend a bit more in future – hopefully it starts to go down!
Our thanks to John for thoroughly putting the Beurer Heavy Duty Diagnostic Scale through its paces.
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