Why Doesn't Woven Have a Scale Or Inbody Machine?
TLDR: We have found using a scale harms more than it helps. It’s not that valuable of a tool no matter how fancy or expensive it is.
At Woven we are weight neutral. While there is a lot of literature correlating lower body weights with better health outcomes, correlation does not mean causation and these findings should not be applied to everyone. It is impossible to ignore the way our culture has been influenced by thought patterns of fatphobia intertwined with patriarchal body standards, which have left so many of us with a distorted view of ourselves and others around us. At Woven we want everyone to exercise because we understand how essential it is to our health and to being the best version of ourselves. We have seen time and time again that the motivation used to exercise derived from a place of self hatred is fleeting and rarely leads to long term success. There is a much longer discussion to be had about these topics, but we want to be extremely sensitive to avoid making the same mistakes as many others in this industry and serves as an introduction to why we choose not to feed into these narratives by having every single one of our clients step on a scale.
The scale is rarely a good indicator of our health and yet quite often we attach so much of our self worth to it. We are afraid to see the number go up and yet for a lot of us the strongest healthiest version of ourselves weighs more than we think it should. In our opinion, if we cannot detach the host of negative emotions from it, I would rather my clients not engage in a practice that will harm them emotionally and hurt their motivation without adding a ton of valuable information. We are not anti-scale. If a client wants to track their weight we are happy to let them. We understand that many find the scale to be a useful tool and have no issues building that tool into our coaching programs. But we are only going to use a tool when it is actually helpful.
The reality is that so many people have scales at home that are just as useful as the ‘fancy’ ones in the gym. Many gym owners have been tricked into believing that the $20,000 Inbody gives us any better information than what we have at home, but the Inbody is one of the most notoriously inaccurate machines for what it purports to do. To be frank, no device that measures body composition is useful except for a DEXA scan. Best estimates are that the Inbody is 3-5% inaccurate. While this sounds great, when you start actually implementing this device with clients, like I did for years, you start to understand how flawed it is. Imagine you start working with a coach because you want to get stronger and you start your assessment with the Inbody. It tells you that you are starting with 100 pounds of muscle and your coach wants you to gain a pound of muscle a month. In an ideal world you have 103 pounds of muscle in 3 months, but when you do an Inbody again in 3 months you are just as likely to get 98 or 108 pounds of muscle as you are to get the ‘true’ 103. So how are you supposed to know if you actually made any progress? When trying to pick up small changes in large numbers 3-5% is simply not an acceptable margin of error.
I personally have had too many of the same conversations with clients over and over again to ignore the hurt and demotivating feelings associated with these two tools. In my opinion, for almost many people, the information they provide simply is not worth the heartache or headache.
