Mine was very useful for weight loss. I bought it because I would plateau quite frequently and I needed some hard(er) data to figure out where the problem was without driving to a large city to get all the testing done. It worked in the same way having a kitchen scale to measure my food did. Whether either of the relatively inexpensive devices were accurate according to some ANSI standards, I wasn't comparing against ANSI standards. They were measuring tools which I could use to measure against themselves in the context of my whole plan. Seeing that hard data helped me with weight loss.

Karen