Meet our new AI Body Scanner
This new tool can help give you a better picture of your progress and your health than just what’s on the scale.
Few things are more frustrating than feeling like you’re exercising and eating with extra attention and care…and not seeing the scale budge. It turns out, you can still be meaningfully improving your health even when you’re not dropping pounds. That’s where our new AI Body Scanner comes in: It’s a new tool in the Weight Watchers app that can make your “invisible" progress become something you can see and appreciate. The results provide you with a more insightful picture of your health by measuring your body fat, lean muscle mass, and waist circumference.* Unlike weight alone, these measurements can help explain what kind of weight your body is carrying and where, which are closely tied to metabolic health, strength, and long-term well-being.
“You wouldn’t be able to see on a standard scale if the type of weight you’re losing is body fat, unless you’re using a body composition tool like the AI Body Scanner,” says Dr. Kerri Masutto, M.D., VP of clinical & behavioral programs at Weight Watchers. “The scale might only move a few pounds, but actually you are moving toward a real reduction in cardiovascular and metabolic risk — and that’s information you can only collect if you're actually tracking these measurements.” Some people want to hold off on the AI Body Scan until they hit their goal weight, says Masutto, but that’s missing out on valuable data you could be collecting along the way to help supercharge your motivation or change your strategy if need be.
How does the Body Scanner work?
The Body Scanner is included with your membership and already available in your WW app. Take a quick body scan in-app using your phone’s camera, and the AI program instantly creates a 3D avatar of your body, including data on your body fat percentage, lean muscle mass percentage, and your waist circumference.
The scans are stored in your app, so if you do the scan monthly, you can overlay the images and see how your body is changing over time. “Once you have three months of data, you're going to see a trend. Your pattern will let you know you're on the right track, and that gives you motivation to stick with it — or your pattern will help you very quickly identify that things might not be headed in the right direction, and then your coach, clinician, or Registered Dietitian can help you find other things to try so you’re not wasting time on things that aren’t working for your body,” says Masutto.
Why is it helpful to measure your body composition?
More information can help you see the impacts of your efforts, far beyond your weight on the scale. The Body Scanner can help you:
Get a better picture of your health
Research suggests that body fat distribution — especially using the waist-to-hip ratio to measure belly fat — may be more indicative of your health than your BMI, which is calculated from your height and weight. The AI Body Scanner* gives you your waist circumference measurement, which studies have shown can be a better predictor of future health (based on all-cause mortality) than BMI.
Ensure you’re losing fat, not muscle
Losing weight, especially with a GLP-1, can lead to losing muscle, not just fat. A key way to ensure the pounds you’re dropping aren’t muscle is to keep tracking your percentages of body fat vs. muscle, says Masutto. Preserving lean mass is critical for long-term weight maintenance as well as strength and mobility as we age. If it turns out you are losing muscle, you and your coach, clinician, or Registered Dietitian can come up with effective interventions, like slow down your weight loss, increase your protein intake, and do more resistance training.
Appreciate progress you might overlook
“We have really poor memory of remembering exactly how we looked or how we felt in the past, so the Body Scanner can give us non-judgmental data,” says Masutto. For example, when you see yourself every day in the mirror, you may not notice differences in how you look, since change is slow and steady. But to get a clearer picture of your progress over time, you can overlay different Body Scans* — say month 1 vs. month 3 — to really notice and appreciate how your body is changing. Also, the adage is true: “muscle does weigh more than fat,” confirms Masutto. That means “the scale may stay stagnant while your body composition improves significantly,” so getting measurements with a Body Scanner can better reflect the progress that’s happening inside you that wouldn’t be reflected on the scale. That can be especially helpful for menopausal women who are just starting to strength train, she says, since they may not lose a lot of weight, but will be able to see with the Body Scanner how they’re adding muscle.
Address what’s not working
In combination with logging what you eat and your activity in the Weight Watchers app, the Body Scan offers more quantitative data to help you see if the steps you’re taking are working. Hopefully, they are! But if you’re not getting the results you hoped for, the Body Scan data can be a game-changer for pivoting faster and smarter. “When people got frustrated, it used to be a best guess about what the issue was and what to change. With the Body Scanner data, now we have a much more precise, evidenced way of being able to help you figure out what you need to do next, because it'll be clear that you’re losing muscle mass, for example, or gaining muscle but not losing fat,” says Masutto. This helps your Clinician or Registered Dietitian meet with you to discuss adjustments to your exercise, nutrition, and even your medication plan without wasting time solving the mystery of what’s not working.
What are healthy results?
Remember, before you compare your Body Scanner number, that these ranges are meant as health guideposts, not as goals.
Women
Generally healthy range: ~21–33%
Health risk tends to increase above: ~35%
Men
Generally healthy range: ~10–25%
Health risk tends to increase above: ~25–28%
How should you use your Body Scan results?
Data can be great — but the possible pitfall is viewing your Body Scan numbers as judgments or becoming fixated on goal numbers. Instead, here are some healthy ways you can use your Body Scan information.
Focus on trends over time, not one-off numbers. Small fluctuations don’t necessarily mean anything. Instead, do a Body Scan* once a month; after you have three months of data, you’ll start to see a pattern or trend in your body composition, says Masutto.
Remember that progress doesn’t always look major. Small, steady improvements — especially in lean mass and waist measurements — often reflect meaningful steps for your health.
It’s not all-or-nothing. You don’t need every number to move in the same direction for your health to be improving.
The bottom line
Many of us have a hard time truly seeing our progress, especially when our weight loss plateaus — something that’s actually expected when we’re building muscle and losing fat. The AI Body Scanner in the Weight Watchers app brings to life data that the scale can’t show. Its information about your body fat percentage, lean muscle mass percentage, and waist circumference can help you track and visualize the changes your body is going through on your health journey, so you can stay knowledgeable, proud, and motivated to keep going.