Manchester study shows frequent scale users lose more weight

Research from the University of Manchester shows the more often people weigh themselves, the more weight they lose.

The findings are based on data collected from 975 participants over four years. Users who interacted the most with Internet-enabled scales are the ones who lost the most weight in a year, according to the study results.

Dr. Matthew Sperrin, lecturer in Health Data Science at the University of Manchester's Health eResearch Centre, led the study. It was created as a partnership with Withings, a manufacturer of connected-health technology that gathered anonymous data from Smart-Scale users in the United Kingdom.

"Connected technology is opening up the opportunities for research teams to understand more about health and investigate new ways to encourage healthier behavior in the general public," Sperrin said. "In this study we wanted to know more about the ways that engagement with weighing scales indicates the users' behavior, something that is only possible with recent advances in technology. By working with Withings, we were able to spot a strong correlation between self-weighing and weight-loss, particularly that the more a patient weighed themselves, the more weight they were shown to lose."