Is the Hume Body Pod Accurate? My DEXA Comparison and Verdict

Cheryl McColgan (00:01.262) Hey everyone, welcome to the HealNursery podcast. Today I am going to discuss a product that I've been using for a while and this will be a little bit different of a podcast episode, although it will weave in some of the tools that I've used over the years to be consistent. And one of those things is the simple body scale. So I'm one of those weirdos that I weigh every single day. I just look at it as data. And I really feel like over the years, this is what's helped me be really consistent and not gain or lose too much weight in any one given time. I know a lot of people are not very excited about using a scale or having daily weigh-ins, but I really do think it's a valuable tool if you're a person that can just treat it as data and not allow whatever the number on the scale says to wreck your day, basically. Because body weight is so dependent really on just day-to-day hydration, whether or not you had a salty meal the night before, that sort of thing. And so what I've noticed over the years is that literally my weight can fluctuate within a week of anywhere from a pound or almost the same every day all the way up to a five pound difference, just depending again, mainly on hydration. if you can look at it that you know, People will often say this and it drives me nuts. I gained three pounds this week or I gained three pounds yesterday and it's like you really didn't. You didn't gain three pounds of fat overnight. You probably just ate something really salty the day before. So what's really important is more the idea of tracking your weight over time and looking for trends and having the ability to have a weekly average or something like that with your weight. So you really just want to look at it as data and not let whatever that number is on any given day rule your world. The other reason that we need to be concerned about body weight and why just a regular scale is not all that useful is because there's never been a really great way to track your body composition using a regular scale. So your regular scale just tells you your weight. It doesn't tell you anything about how much percent fat you have or how much muscle you have. Cheryl McColgan (02:22.606) or anything like that. as I've been going through my little weightlifting consistency thing over the last 18 months, you know, it's been a big goal of mine to put on more muscle. so oftentimes what has happened on the scale, and I can track this because I've gotten several decks of scans over time when I was making this a new goal of mine, is that, for example, in a six month period, even though I'd been working out really consistently and doing a lot of things that should have affected my weight. If I was looking at my weight as just the number on the scale, after six months, my weight was exactly the same. It was crazy. And if you didn't have some kind of tool like a dexter or whatever, you might've thought, I didn't make any progress at all. And it would really be easy to get discouraged. But what actually happened in that amount of time is that I had put on three pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat at the same time. which is really amazing. Yet with a traditional scale, all you'd get on the scale is that you were exactly the same. And so that can be really defeating. And so one of the tools, and I've talked about this over before, that I've used over the years is a body fat scale. And they use bioelectrical impedance to send electrical current through your body. And basically the way that it works is that your muscle holds a lot more water than fat. it, the electrical signal passes through it. I always get this little confused, but it's either it passes through it more quickly or less quickly than that. And that's how they tell the difference. And so then using some kind of calculation and algorithm, they're able to predict your body fat and your muscle mass based on that electrical signal. Now, when these first came out, they were not very consistent at all, but I've always been an early adopter and I've always been involved in the health and wellness space for a really long time. So I had one of the first ones that came out, a bioelectrical impedance scale. based on, know, I think I had my first, like I had a hydrostatic, which is where you actually immerse yourself in water. And this used to be the gold standard of body composition, you get immersed in water to do your body fat. And I had had the scale at the same time. So I knew. Cheryl McColgan (04:43.286) that the scale was really off. But what has always been good for is trends because what it will do relatively well is track over time, are you losing fat, gaining fat, losing muscle, gaining muscle. So in that way, it was kind of useful. then it still is just acts like a regular scale and tells you you're right every day. So the first one I had probably 15 years ago or whenever those first came out, not that great, but had it for years. And then probably about five years ago, I'd say I invested in a new one. was a withings and it was definitely better and had some other little features that I really liked. Like it had a cardiovascular health number that was based on, there's this other thing that it can measure with the electrical current and kind of tell you the ideas if your vessels are flowing more openly or more closed and kind of just give you some indicator of cardiovascular health. So I really liked the withings scale for that. had that for several years. Also knew that based on DEXA that it wasn't really very accurate in comparison what the body fat actually was. And so then I had the opportunity to try the Hume Health Field. I'm just going to show it to you. Here it is. And if you'll notice my background in the room right now, I'm in a different spot because I'm actually out in Utah snowboarding for two months. And so I actually brought this with me. So that should tell you something. Number one, I did want to finally do this review. But number two, like I said, it's really important for me to stand track. have some other body composition goals this year that I'm working on and I didn't want to go for like nine weeks without this tool. So the fact that I carried it with me in my luggage should tell you that I at least think it is pretty good. that is the, you know, this is the upshot of the review is that I do like it a lot, but I'm going to tell you kind of some of the downsides to it, the upsides to it, what I found it to be. in relation to dexics, and had two dexes, well three dexes actually, since I've had this, and since I've been using it, but what I really wanted to do, so I could do this review for you guys, is to take my measurement with this Hume scale at home, and then immediately not changing my hydration or anything like that, going directly to my dexa and getting those numbers so that I could compare them. Cheryl McColgan (07:03.904) And so that's what I've done. so again, here's the scale. And so what's different about this when it has this thing that pulls out, this is that you put your hands on it while you're standing on this scale so that it has more points of contact with your skin to do the bioelectrical impedance. And if you go to a gym that has an in-body, that's the same technology. And a lot of people think that in-body is pretty good. So you're getting a technology now years later that is vastly better. It's still not perfect, but then Dexa is not really perfect either. When you get a Dexa scan, every different machine has a little bit different measurements. And you can tell this because when you see the document that I have where I have the Dexa scans that I was getting in Utah on the scanner there, and then the different Dexas that I was getting when I got back to Ohio, a different scanner gives you different numbers. And it's not that your body composition. magically change overnight, it's that each individual machine, number one, they have two different algorithms that they use on the DEXA to calculate body fat. so it really depends on which one they use. And I learned about this because when I went to the new DEXA in Ohio, I had told him I had been getting them before and he said, Oh, do you know what formula they used? And I said, no. And he said, well, there's two different ones and it can give you a different results. So the main thing is once you start using a DEXA is just try to go to the same facility in the same machine every time that'll give you the most consistency. And then know that if you go to a different one, I actually had one too at a conference a few years ago and that the machine gave me kind of some different numbers at the time too. So there's nothing that's going to be perfect. And so even a DEXA scanner has a margin of error every time that you're on it. And so based on hydration, based on the margin of error, you're getting something like a variance of five to 10 % in any given set of readings. And so it's just important to keep that in mind. So again, with any of these tools, what you're looking for is change over time and you're trying to be as consistent as possible with when you weigh. So typically what I do with either the DEXA or just when I get on the scale in the morning, I get up, first of all, I at night, you know, I have a kind of a routine of Cheryl McColgan (09:23.66) when I'm drinking before bed and things like that, it's not perfect. They don't always cut it off at the same time every night. So that can cause some variance. But basically, you know, after I go to bed, I don't drink anything in the middle of the night ever really, unless I am just like desperately needing some for some reason. But so I'll wake up, I'll go to the bathroom, get on the scale. Ideally, you want to be naked because you want the variance of the clothes being involved every time. And, you know, put my hands on the electrodes and stand on the scale, get the reading, and then I go on with my day, have my coffee, drink my morning glass of water, all that kind of good stuff. So, and it's consistent as you be with the same time every morning. If you were really good about your hydration and you kind of really drink almost the same thing every single day, like keep track of your ounces of water, like we all should be doing better about, I'm actually working on that myself right now. but then in cutting it off at the same time every night and then getting up at the same time every morning and getting that review on the scale, that is going to give you the most consistent results. When I can tell big variance on the scale is when I'm dehydrated or conversely, if I had a really salty meal or something like that the night before or went out the night before. So for example, dehydration, if you drink alcohol, you might notice that it dehydrates you. And so anytime we had a night where we'd go out and say, have some wine with dinner, something like that. or we had wine with dinner at home. Actually, that's a better example because the level of salt in the food is totally normal and everything like that. So what I would find on a night after having wine, I'd wake up and the scale would be down sometimes as much as two to three pounds just because of the dehydration caused by alcohol. Conversely, if I go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant or really any restaurant, but they use a lot more salt, there's often ingredients that my body's not necessarily used to. And then what will usually happen on a night like that, I might wake up and get on the scale and my weight is off another two or three pounds in the up direction. So number one, again, no reason to panic. You didn't magically gain three pounds of fat overnight, but what you will notice is that your scale, if you're using one of these bio, any bioelectric impedance scale, because of the hydration levels is how it reads your body fat and your muscle mass. Cheryl McColgan (11:40.462) you will notice that those wildly fluctuate too. So for example, you might be going along during a week, you ate at home every night, you're doing well, blah, blah. Everything's the same and all the readings will be very, very similar throughout that whole week until you have one of those days where something was different and boom, you might see your muscle mass suddenly drop way down. And it's nice because the app, and I'll just show you this right now, pull it up so that you can see what I'm talking about, but it does a graph and you can do it by day, or month. And so, For example, if I put it on week, you'll see that, you know, obviously there's some fluctuations day to day in that. And let me scan back and see if I can find any other big, well, that's for the week ones, but the daily ones, like I said, is where you'll see quite often some big variants. So this is why you track over a week, because you can see sometimes it's really consistent when I'm, you know, eating at home and having level of hydration and then boom, it might pop up because I went out or something. or levels of hydration change. So that looks like that on every single one of these. That was weight, and I'll pop over to here to lean mass. You can see here was a big spike in lean mass. I didn't magically gain more lean mass overnight. But you can see if you're tracking over time, and let me pop over to the month view. So then you can see that that's where it's important. You want to get those trends. So you can see that my weight has been trending down over the last several months. working on that purposely. And that gives you a glimpse of the app too. It's really nice because it breaks it down into weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, fat mass. It does it by each arm and each leg, just like Dexa will tell you how much you've gained or lost mass in each body part. so I think I'm to the point now where you can see it's not perfect. And again, I described the Dexa, it's not perfect either. But according to Hume, their results show that they correlate with the amount 2 % of DEXA in general. And they did some studies on that. And then I also pulled up a more recent study on bioelectrical impedance. And it just talked about the variance even in the clinical level setting of these tools. So no tools would be perfect, but I do and have found it to be very useful and useful for tracking. So what I did for this video, and if you're listening to this on the podcast, you might want to pop over to the show notes and just take a look. I put this all. Cheryl McColgan (14:06.102) in a spreadsheet. You know, kind of geeky like that if you know me. Anyway, I want to just compare the readings that I got the day that I got the DEXA in the morning that I stepped on the Hume scale and compare them for you. So I'm going to attempt I've never done this before, but I should be able to share a window in my computer. And so if you're watching on YouTube, you'll be able to see that. So I'm going to share the spreadsheet. that I created and this will be in the show notes a link to this document. So hopefully this is showing up correctly right now and that you can see it. But you'll notice I highlighted some of things in yellow there. And what I observed is that the thing that the scale is most accurate on compared to Dexa is the lean mass. And this is actually pretty cool because that's really what I've been working towards the last. You know, going on two years now and just trying like prioritizing protein. I've been doing that for a couple of years before I started lifting. And then now since I have been consistently lifting for the past 18 months, this has been something I have really wanted to work on is, you know, increasing that lean mass. And it's for all the reasons that I've talked about in many podcasts before just aging well, keeping up your strength, being able to do the things that you want to do daily in life. is. absolutely improved my snowboarding ability. I noticed a pretty big difference on the mountain in my leg strength and how my legs feel after a day in the deep house. So it's been pretty cool to experience that. But you'll see if you look at some of these numbers that if you look at the DEXA number that I got, like for example, the right arm lean on this September DEXA was 5.6 and then the Hume said it was 6.2 and then This was actually one of the biggest differences here. But then you'll see the right leg, 17.5, Hume said 19. I find that the Hume in general overestimates a little bit on the lean mass and underestimates a little bit on the fat. That might be a marketing ploy, maybe just to make you feel a little better about yourself. But you know, when I calculated the percent change and I'm… Cheryl McColgan (16:19.182) Fairly sure that I did this right. We're looking at anywhere between 2 % to 10 % variance. There's one thing I noticed on the trunk fat and trunk lean on the app. For some reason, it's not reporting the right numbers anymore. The trunk lean should be in the 50s, and one of them, it's coming out on the Hume is like 19 in the app. So I think that's just an app glitch. I actually did submit a ticket to the developers so that they know about that. If you want to look at this further, have three tabs that has three different DEXAs and the results of the Hume. So you can look at that a little closer if you're interested in this kind of thing. So I'm just going to go ahead and stop that for now. But what I observed, the trends over time are accurate. So if it was saying that I was losing body fat on the DEXA, which I did, it was also showing that I lost body fat on the Hume. And like I said, the body parts specific ones are fairly close to what the Dexa was reading. And again, there's always these variances, so not too worried about it. I'm more just interested in tracking these things over time. And you know, it's the best tool that we have for an at home way to track these things right now. So even though it's not perfect, I find it's really useful. I've been enjoying it. It's kept me more consistent. It's definitely interesting to look at all that data each morning when I get up and particularly now that I've used it for several months. Like I said, the day-to-day things, can't really put any stock in that. The weekly trends, yes, you can see that because you'll see, I lost a little weight or might have lost a little fat this week. But then the monthly ones are really where you're going to see it. And that's why I wanted to wait until, like I said, now it's been six months that I've been using it because if I just use it for the first month or something, I'm not really going to be able to know if it is accurately tracking the trends because that's just not enough data yet. And so I think it'll be interesting to just keep using this over time because then I can see, okay, if I get ready to do the thing that I've been thinking about as a goal this year, and I'm not quite ready to announce it yet, but there should be a pretty big difference in some of those numbers. And so I'll be able to more closely track that. And if I go through with this, I will definitely do another report a few months down the road so you can see those new numbers and how. Cheryl McColgan (18:41.9) they changed on the Hume compared to the Dexa, because they'll get another Dexa at the beginning and end of this process, so I can see how things went. anyway, the other thing about it is because I have ended up liking it and using it and wanted to be involved with this and use it and test it out, I did get a code with them. And so if you go to healnourishgrow.com slash humehealth, you get an additional percentage off. And whenever it's on sale, like right now it's on sale. If you happen to be watching this when it first comes out, is on sale 35 % off for Valentine's Day. Well, my code stacks on top of that. So that's pretty awesome. And it always stacks on top of it as far as, you know, unless they change that at some point in the future. But right now, if you use my code, healnourishgrow, or just go to that link that I said, it'll automatically put the code in. And so whatever the sale price is, you get more off on top of that. So if you have any specific questions about it, please make sure you reach out to me or leave it in the comments below. If you came to my channel, by the way, on YouTube, because you were looking for a view for Hume Health, I hope you'll subscribe and stay with me. I talk about all things health and wellness here. I have great guests on the podcast. We talk about all kinds of random health and wellness kind of things. And if you subscribe and support the channel, that's really the best thing you can do to support it is subscribe. the more popular it is, the more people find it, the more I can get good guests and share more of this kind of information with you. So I would really appreciate that. Hit the like button, all that good stuff, leave a review on iTunes. And yeah, so I hope this was helpful. I will also have in the show notes, I'm going to actually write out some of these points in an article to support this video. And there might be more details there. might link, well, for example, I'll link, there's a study, a screenshot. linked in the spreadsheet that I was just showing you that is from a recent 2025 study by a Dutch group talking about dexas and their accuracy, or sorry, bioelectrical impedance scales and their accuracy. And then I'll also probably add in there one about the dexa accuracy and some of the limitations of that. if you listen to people in this space that are really focused on muscle health, for example, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Cheryl McColgan (21:01.55) You know, none of the tools that we have right now to measure body composition are all that great. And she's been saying that for quite a while now. So, but this is the best we have. And so if you're a person, if you are working on body composition things, trying to lose weight, one thing I would caution if you're trying to lose weight, you know, you want to lose fat, you don't want to lose muscle mass. So that's one important thing to track on this. That's one thing that people have been struggling with when they decide to use GLP-1s is a lot of people lose muscle mass on that. if you're just losing weight in general, even if you're not losing weight loss, that's a really common thing because you have to. And this is the other thing we always talk about here, right? Prioritize protein, especially when you're doing a fat loss day. So you want to shoot for one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So for example, if you are, say you're a woman who's about average height, five foot five, something like that, and you weigh 160, but your ideal weight is 100. 30, then you'd for at least 130 grams of protein a day and you go a little above that. If also, if you are strength training on a regular basis, doing that quite a lot, you might want to go even for a little more than that or at least the high end of that range. So anytime you're in a fat loss phase, weight loss phase, eat more protein, it helps protect your muscle mass and also lift some weights while you're trying to lose weight. will protect your muscle mass. I suspect there's some studies, even if you're not lifting quote unquote, super heavy, you're trying to stimulate your muscles to know that you need them and you need them to stick around. So when you're in a calorie deficit, you don't want your body deciding to break down the muscles because you're not being used. So anything you can do to stimulate muscle growth, muscle protein synthesis, the other thing is eating at least 30 grams of protein every single meal that you eat so that you stimulate muscle protein synthesis. anyway, again, this, video was meant to be mainly a review, but also throwing those things in, obviously, that we always talk about here so that if you are working on fat loss, that you will not make some of the mistakes that really hurt people in their endeavors to do that. So again, hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about the human health scale. I'll still be over here using it every day either way. And I would love to hear your experiences too. Have you tried it? Are you looking at getting it? Cheryl McColgan (23:27.086) What are your thoughts? you already have one of these kind of scales? Because like I said, this is definitely the best one I've ever owned up to this point. It's a lot more consistent. It's a lot more close in the numbers to the actual body fat and the lean mass percentages, all that kind of stuff. Again, it's not perfect, but pretty much the best we have for at home right now. So anyway, take care and I will talk to you again soon.