WOA:

a new way to see your weight

Because our weight is not just one number!

Table of Contents
WOA: A NEW WAY TO SEE YOUR WEIGHT

CAN ONE NUMBER REPRESENT OUR WEIGHT?

WHY SHOULD WE KNOW OUR OWN WEIGHT OSCILLATION?

WOA : A SOLUTION FOR A TECHNICAL PROBLEM

8
14

THE WOA ADVANTAGES

Can one number represent our weight?

We cannot consider human weight to be just one number a day. Im trying to say
that a humans weight is something alive (literally!), something that expands and
shrinks all the time. Every minute something is happening in your body that
changes your total mass weight. So, why do we need to consider just one number as
our weight?
Lets prove this fact. You be the scientist here. Take an old scale and step on it, with
clothes and everything, every 30 minutes for the next eight hours. Note the results
in a table, and done! You will see different measurements. Am I right?
Probably you went to bathroom, or drank some water (I hope!), or ate a piece of
fruit. These activities make it easy to understand the changes in your weight. Lets
try another experience. Tonight we will measure you again. You dont need to wake
every hour to measure yourself, just step on the scale before and after you sleep.
Probably your weight in the morning is lower than before. Now its starting to be
difficult to explain why your weight changed. What happened? Well, if your mattress
was wet when you woke up, it is easy to explain, but if it was not, you can realize
that to be alive you consume some mass.
It is clear that one number a day does not represent our weight. Apparently, human
weight is something that behaves as a frequency. Our weight oscillates during the
day, during the night, during the period that we are alive! Then I ask again, Why do
we consider human weight to be just one number?

You are the doctor! Maybe you are thinking that, You, Dr. Renato, should know the
answer.
Well, I understand why human body weight oscillates. Right now in your body a lot
of reactions are happening to keep you alive, from your brain that is trying to
interpret my English to your immunological system, from your heart that insists on
beating to your body temperature that needs to be around 98.6F.
It takes a lot of energy to make everything happen. Basically, our body uses heat to
make a lot of chemical reactions that maintain its working. This heat is a
transformation of different nutrients, like proteins, fat and carbohydrates, notably
the last two. Scientists measure this energy and they have a name for this: calories.
Normally, I explain this in a different way. For me, humans are a soup that can walk
(more than 60% of our body is water!), a soup with a 98.6F temperature. So, if you
want to maintain a 200 Lbs. soup warm in a cauldron on your stove at that
temperature for one year, you will need a lot of energy! Maybe now you realize how
much energy we consume.
This energy consumption is responsible for your weight variations at night. Another
example could be firewood. You can weigh wood before you burn it and weigh the
ashes after. You will see a big difference!! Your body does the same with fat and
carbohydrates, but thank God we normally do not catch fire! Our reactions are
controlled by our cells, and the insides of our cells.
So, every night, your body burns nutrients to make the reactions that it needs to
keep you alive. In order to do that, it uses energy (calories). The consumption of

these nutrients, like the burning of firewood, is what changes your total mass
weight.

But what I cannot explain is why we still consider just one number as a human
weight reference.
Now, with so much technology and so much space available to store data, lets make
computers and technology work for us. Thats why I invested a few years of my life
researching human weight oscillation and created a new way to track human
weight. Now we have a new and modern way to track our weight.

Why should we know our own weight oscillation?

The answer is simple, to know our real weight.
Otherwise you will have a number that is, actually, an approximation of your weight.
More than half of us (people that can read) are trying to control or lose weight, but
how can we do it if we dont know our real weight?
Lets use an example: a man six feet tall weighing 200lb. This guy could be a very
strong athlete but, unfortunately, less than 5% of our population has a body with
these dimensions with ideal fat mass. Note that BMI and body fat percentage are
two different things. BMI is related to your total body mass, which is a composition
of many things. One of these things is fat. To increase your total body mass you,
mainly do it by absorbing more water, having more muscles, or, most frequently,
storing more fat. So, the correlation between BMI and fat deposits is really strong,
and in few cases (less than 5% of our population) people can have a BMI over 25
with an adequate percentage of fat, normally this people are high performance
athletes.
So, in our example, this man is overweight and he wants (needs) to lose weight.
Normally, he would start a diet program with the recommendation that he weigh
himself at least once a week on the same day at the same time. (If you, reader, have
already tried any kind of diet, you already know that the best option is not to step on
the scale, right?).
But, in real life, many times I have heard from my patients that they were weighing
themselves once a month, or not weighing themselves at all. I think this frustration
is easy to understand, and I blame human weight oscillation for that.

In this new way to track human weight, instead of 200Lbs, we will say that the low
point of his weight oscillation is 198 and the high point is 202. We could represent
it like this:

Figure 1 - Weight oscillation

This person is telling us that his weight is 200Lbs. What we know is that at a specific
time his weight was 200Lbs. If we think of an oscillation as a way of tracking weight,
we will have some questions. First, where can we insert this weight in his oscillation
curve? On top of the oscillation or at the bottom of the oscillation? And, by the way,
yes! We can oscillate more than 4 Lbs. a day!
Many scientific papers tell us that we need to maintain our weight loss at 2 to 2.5lb
per week to be something healthy and sustainable. Lets say that after one week
following a new diet his new weight measurement is 198 lbs. What could our
conclusion be? The first week, his weight was 200 lbs. and now its 198, so hes
losing weight.
Or not??

Lets say that 200 lbs. was a point on the middle of his oscillation. We understand
that 198 lbs is just the bottom line of his normal oscillation and he is not losing
weight but maintaining weight, an effect very well know as a plateau.
Perhaps it might be that 200 lbs. was his bottom point and now 198 is his new
middle point, so in this case he is losing weight.
But the worst scenario is that 200lb was his upper and now 198 is his minimum
point. In this case, his upper point would be 202lbs, we could conclude that he is
gaining weight!
A lot of people start to get angry with the number that the scale is showing
them, well knowing that human weight has an oscillation, and the scales are
telling just part of the story. Somehow we have a technical problem here.
Human weight daily oscillation hides the real weight trend.

WOA : a solution for a technical problem

Today, what people and software/apps are doing is noting weight as number. Then
they plot this number as a dot on a graph and, finally as children do, they connect
the dots.
When you track your weight with WOA, you will NOT connect the dots. We
developed a complex algorithm that is capable of learning with your oscillation, and
showing your future weight oscillation.
The connect the dots strategy is not a bad thing, by the way. It is better than
nothing, but can be very frustrating.
For example, in figure 2, you see a graph where a person is apparently gaining
weight. How do we know that? Because we have a record of her or his weight,
because we plotted on a graph, and because we connected the dots, which reveals
the tendency of weight. Note on the graph that the last measurement is lower than
the one before, a situation that happened six times in 4 weeks. Without a graph with
the connect the dots strategy this person, probably, would be confused by the
numbers that the scale showed. This exercise proved that the connect the dots
strategy has value but can be frustrating.

Figure 2 - "Connect the dots" Strategy

And using WOA what will be the difference? First of all, if a person has a tendency to
gain weight, she or he will gain weight with or without WOA. With this said, the
WOA difference is not the result (unfortunately we dont have software that can
make people lose weight!) but how people manage their trend. We believe that we
are delivering a simple, clever, and less stressful way to track weight.
Basically, the idea of WOA is to improve the results offered by scales, uncovering the
real weight trend that is hidden on the weight daily oscillation. So, instead of a
number, WOA will show your WOA Range, which is your weight oscillation. Besides
that, it will show your trend two weeks from now. You can see how in figure 3.

Figure 3 - WOA result

We could highlight the fact that WOA does not talk about your past; it talks about
your future. In our trials we achieved 95% accuracy when people DID NOT change
their food intake, exercise patterns, or sleeps behaviors.
The problem is that the majority of people that we know do not live in
laboratories, which makes everything more complicated.
Because of this small detail we improved the WOA results, inserting the tendency
of your weight trend to change. Well, it sounds weird that we are talking about the
tendency of a trend, but it reflects the changes that our day-to-day routine imposes
on our weight.

For us, every time that we step on a scale the number that it is showing is important,
for sure, but it is not the main information that we can get. You can see how in figure
4.

Figure 4 - WOA result

This Tendenciometer shows the probability that your trend can change. It is really
complicated to calculate (and consumes a lot of memory of our computers ) but the
result is very simple to understand. In the figure 4 case, that person is losing weight
and is stable in this trend.
The problem is when we are gaining weight. Sometimes we are taking actions to
change the gaining weight trend, but the WOA Trend will not change right away.,

WOA needs to understand whether your behavior change lasts longer than three
days. For example, a person with a weight-gaining trend who changes his diet for
three days, consuming fewer calories, will get this message from WOA:

Figure 5 - Gaining weight

The new way to track human weight is not only about math and statistics. It is an
algorithm which includes rules about the human metabolism, and also considers
facts of human physiology.
So, we put computers to work for us. They (computers), using an artificial
intelligence process, will store your data and will define the range of your weight

oscillation every week. The buzz words for these processes is that they will data
mine big data to calculate your weight oscillation.

The WOA advantages

WOA only needs your weight to predict your weight trend. Thats a big difference.
We dont need to measure calorie intake, physical activity, record nutrition
information or even your body fat percentage. Besides you can weigh yourself with
clothes on. The objective of WOA is to make your life easy.
WOA shows you if you are reaching a kind of plateau, if you are really losing weight,
or gaining weight.
It shows your real trend!
The intention is that people can perceive where their weight is really heading . If we
could make a scale to measure people, it would not show a number, it would show
the graph that you see above, telling you your actual path. You dont need to know
your number, just if your trend is following your intention. We have only three
options: gaining, losing or maintaining weight.
On top of that, WOA reveals whether or not your trend is stable. So, if you are losing
weight, but WOA is telling you that you are reaching a plateau, you can do
something now to change your future weight trend.
Anxiety about losing weight makes people gain weight!! It is a long and boring
process. With WOA, at least people will understand if they are following their goals.