Everyday people around the world step on to a scale to see what they weigh, but is this really the most effective tool for measuring our health? Michael Fedewa and Mike Esco, lifelong health and fitness researchers, co-founders of MADE Health and Fitness, and Cade Prize finalists tell us why cutting edge technology on our smartphones may be the best tool for managing our health. By simply downloading an app and taking a photo we can gain an accurate assessment of our health, body fat % included,  that is as accurate as what we could get from a high-tech lab.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Speaker 1: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to radio Cade and podcast from the cave museum for creativity and invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Welcome to radio Cade . I'm your host, James de Virgilio. And here's something for you to think about as you're beginning to listen to this podcast, why are you measuring weight loss? Should you even measure weight loss when you got on the scale this morning, this week, last week, a month ago, is that number relevant? And is it telling you what you want to know about your health? My guests today, both co-founders of the made health and fitness app, Michael FITO and Mike ESCO, joining the program to tell us about maybe why we're not reading our scale correctly, Michael and Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having us . All right . So you told me pre-show that we're going to call Michael FITA his last name, and then we're going to call Mike ESCO to keep things simple for our listeners. So we have FITO and ESCO and de Virgilio three last names that are great for a podcast. Let's start talking about this then right away, weight loss, something that obviously is very, very important, perhaps even more important in light of COVID now, but here we are teasing out the beginning saying maybe your scale, isn't the primary thing you should be using to measure whether or not you are getting more or less healthy. That's right. I'm curious. Tell me why. That's the case. That's the primary way in which people will evaluate progress on a weight loss program? I mean, after all, they want to lose weight, but the question becomes, where is that weight loss coming from? We have fat mass, which is the culprit of poor health. And then we have lean mass with muscle involved in that. And we're just based in our progress on weight loss in general, there's no way of really knowing how much fat mass was lost versus fat free mass or muscle mass as lost research shows that through most weight loss programs, there is muscle that is lost through that. And then the question becomes how much. So imagine we're starting out and someone says to you, I'd like to lose some weight. I'm just going to eat less calories or exercise more. And we could spend hours discussing that in a podcast, but I want to lose more weight. Of course the response would be, well, you really are saying you want to lose fat and you want to maintain your muscle and what you are suggesting. And I think science is definitively telling us is that if I lose 10 pounds, what matters to me is where did those pounds come from, right? How much was fat and how much was muscle and the scale is not going to tell me that. Correct? Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, in our research we have pretty good evidence. We kind of use a three quarters rule. So if you a pound of weight,

Speaker 3: 3:00

Most