Lepulse Smart Health Gadgets Review: Can a $119 Scale Rival a DEXA Scan and Change How You Track Your Fitness?

Over the past year, I’ve cleaned up my diet, tracked what I ate religiously, and lost almost 50 pounds. I was measuring my weight with a regular scale, but I had a lot of discussions with my personal trainer about how to better track my progress as I got closer to my goals. Luckily for both of us, the good folks at Lepulse offered up their Food Scale, Smart Tape Measure, and P1 scale at just the right time, and they’ve definitely been a boon to refining my health journey!

Lepulse may not be a household name, but they make an impressive slate of health gadgets. They offer several body fat scale options at multiple price points and features. All their devices sync with the Fitdays+ app, which pulls all the data into one place and helps you better assess your health and goals.

We received the Lepulse Smart Food Scale, the Smart Body Tape Measure, and the P1 Professional 8-Electrode Body Fat Scale. Let’s start with the P1 Scale, as it’s really the center of the whole ecosystem.

P1 Professional 8-Electrode Body Fat Scale

The P1 that we reviewed is pitched as being nearly in lockstep with a DEXA scan, the gold standard in assessing not only your weight but your body composition. There are a few differences, though.

Lepulse’s scale uses electrical impedance to determine your body composition, while a DEXA scan uses a low amount of radiation (about what you’d be exposed to on an extended airplane flight). DEXA also requires a technician and a special bed, while the Lepulse P1 requires a flat surface somewhere in your own home and the occasional visit with a USB-C charger. Finally, DEXA can cost anywhere from $120 to over $300 if you’re paying out of pocket, while the P1 is a one-time cost of $119.

It’s a tall order to claim that a $120 scale is equivalent to a professional assessment of your body composition. The good news, for both Lepulse and the consumer, is that this claim is dead-on accurate. We ran an experiment where I measured with the P1 in the morning when I woke up, and then headed to a professional DEXA scan.

The results were surprisingly close. Weight was almost exactly the same (I measured with the P1 with and without clothes on since the DEXA was done clothed; the clothed weights were nearly identical).

Body fat came in a touch lower on the DEXA scale but not by a dramatic amount. Both showed around the same lean (non-fat) mass, and both assessed my bone health as being excellent. The DEXA technician noted I had an especially dense skull, so I’ve been telling everyone I’m super hard-headed, but aside from that, I gleaned basically the same information from the P1 as I did from the DEXA.

One of the biggest advantages of the Lepulse P1 is its 8-electrode technology, which goes far beyond the typical bathroom scale. Most standard smart scales use four electrodes that contact your feet, primarily measuring electrical impedance through your lower body and using that information to estimate overall body composition. The P1 adds four electrodes in its handheld grip, allowing it to measure electrical impedance through both your upper and lower body. This lets it estimate fat and muscle mass across five separate body segments: your left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, and torso.

That extra detail is particularly useful if you’re strength training or concentrating on developing specific muscle groups. Instead of simply seeing that your overall muscle mass has increased, you can get a better idea of where those changes are happening. If you’ve been putting extra effort into leg workouts, for example, you can track whether your estimated leg muscle mass is trending upward over time. The same goes for your arms and torso.

It’s a much more informative approach than relying on a single body fat percentage or muscle mass number, especially when you’re trying to build strength while losing fat. These are still estimates rather than precise measurements of individual muscles, but they can provide useful insight into how your body composition is changing.

That’s only a small snapshot of the data that you get from the P1. As you can see, I can also track ongoing trends over time, and I can see that in the time I’ve tested that my weight has gone down and my body fat has decreased, while my lean muscle mass has increased slightly and my bones remain strong. There are also ways to track your protein and water weight, but I’m less concerned about those metrics.

You can also set a goal weight and goal body fat in the app. For now, I’ve set my goal to 170 pounds (losing another 14 pounds) and to bring my body fat down to 24%. The app helpfully tracks where I am in relation to that goal, so I can see that I’m 20% of the way to my goal weight and 11% of the way to my body fat goal.

I’ll be honest: I chose the body fat goal somewhat arbitrarily as a reasonable but not insane number. If I reach it, great; if I blow past it, fantastic, but I expect that hitting my goal weight will also help with hitting the body fat goal as long as I continue to maintain and increase muscle mass.

Using the scale is super easy. Fire up the Fitdays+ app, hold the electrical measurement handle out in front of you, and step on the scale. After about 30 seconds, the measurements pop up, and you’re good to go! I have fallen into the habit of measuring every morning when I get up and ready for the day, so the measurements are consistently taken at the same time. It doesn’t matter when you measure, but since your body weight can bounce around throughout the day, it’s best to measure at the same time each day.

I only had an issue with the electrical impedance measurement once, and it was because I didn’t have the metal contacts fully against the palm of my hand. The app alerted me to the mismeasurement, and I just hopped off and started again. Otherwise, it gave me zero issues and didn’t require much thought, which is good when you’re measuring right after waking up!

You get a lot of the same data on the screen on the scale as you do in the app, but I hardly look at the screen because without glasses on, all I see are delightful multicolored scribbles (and one memorable time I thought it said 198 and not 193, and after that I stopped trying to read it without glasses for my own sanity!)

Overall, I’m madly in love with the P1 scale. It’s super easy to use, the data is accessible and allows you to really drill down on your health, and it only adds about 30 seconds to my morning routine. As a minor added bonus, the app feeds my weight right to the Apple Health app, which then feeds the data to LoseIt!, meaning I don’t have to sit down and keep everything in sync.

Smart Food Scale

The Lepulse Smart Food Scale brings its own smarts to the kitchen. A scale is essential if you’re looking to watch your diet. It makes it easier to dial in EXACTLY what you’re eating, so you’re not guesstimating amounts. For example, it helped me better understand what a portion of, say, Greek yogurt is, so if I’m eating somewhere else where I don’t have a scale, I can feel confident eyeballing the amount I ate. Or if I’m making a protein for dinner, I can measure it out and have a better sense of what one serving should be.

In that respect, the food scale was fantastic. I was using a cheap one I grabbed at the grocery store, and the Lepulse scale is nicer in every way. It’s easy to toggle between different measurements (grams, ounces, milliliters), and to tare as you add things and measure new items as needed. I also loved the finish, which not only looks nice in the kitchen but is also easy to wipe down and keep clean.

Another nice feature is that the Lepulse Smart Food Scale doesn’t just tell you how much something weighs. Its built-in display can also show multiple nutritional values, including calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and other nutritional information, without requiring you to pull out your phone every time you want to check something. That’s a welcome convenience when you’re preparing meals and want to keep an eye on what you’re eating without constantly bouncing between the scale and an app.

For anyone who’s serious about fitness, those extra details can be just as important as counting calories. If you’re strength training while trying to lose weight, for example, you need enough protein to maintain and build muscle, while carbohydrates help fuel your workouts and recovery.

Seeing both, along with their relative amounts in your food, makes it easier to understand whether your meals support what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s especially useful when you’re trying to balance weight loss with muscle development, rather than simply eating less and hoping for the best.

It has another trick up its sleeve: it can connect to the Fitdays app and log what you’re eating. So if I measure a bowl of blueberries and either select blueberries on the scale or in the app, it’ll automatically log it for me. I played with this feature, but since I use LoseIt! for my main food log, I didn’t do much with it.

I did find that the calorie estimates lined up with LoseIt!, and like LoseIt!, it has a barcode scanner to log food, so if you use it as a food log, it seems accurate. But as I said, it was a nice feature that wasn’t really something I needed. At $49.99, it’s a rock-solid scale with a great companion app, and it’s well worth the extra cost over a cheap $20 scale.

Smart Body Tape Measure

One thing that my trainer and I discuss a lot when we discuss nutrition and health is not to get too hung up on the scale number each day. Bodies are weird, and they can fluctuate a lot and for many reasons. I’ve seen my weight shift 2-3 pounds because I ate dinner too late the night before, didn’t drink enough water, drank too much water, or had an especially intense workout session the day before.

To avoid getting into a rabbit hole of stressing about the number on the scale, my trainer has been great about encouraging me to focus on other metrics. Losing weight has increased my flexibility immensely. You can see a lot of my muscle definition. I went from an XL shirt and a size 40 waist to a medium shirt size and a size 34 waist.

One way to measure this is, well, with measurements. Even if the scale isn’t moving dramatically, that doesn’t mean you’re not losing inches (or centimeters for our non-US readers). Have you ever tried to measure yourself with fabric tape, though? Unless you have several extra limbs and possibly Mr. Fantastic-level stretchiness, you’ll have a hard time positioning the tape AND reading the results.

That’s where the Smart Tape Measure comes in, along with the Fitdays app. The app shows you a diagram of your body and tells you what to measure when you’re taking body measurements. Then you pull out the measuring tape, tighten it as accurately as possible around the body part you’re measuring, and hit the check button on the device. The app picks up the values and moves on to the next body part you’re measuring.

Like with weight, muscle, and other measurements, you can see your latest measurements and trends over time in the app. I can see how my hip and waist have dropped dramatically over time, but I’ll admit the shoulder/neck/head measurements may be a little funky because I had some issues with doing it right the first time. Still, again, the idea here is to look at metrics that aren’t a number on a scale. My weight is creeping down, but I can see that I lost an inch off my waist and almost an inch and a half off my hip from when I started measuring.

I tried to take body measurements every few weeks, so I had three over the course of this review. Body measurements aren’t like weighing yourself. Twisting yourself around and measuring your thigh circumference daily isn’t going to yield anything more useful than making yourself nuts. But once a month, or once every 3 weeks or so, is enough time to see and feel differences, and it can really help you grasp the physical changes in your body over time. For $35.99, this is a no-brainer if you’re part of the Lepulse ecosystem.

It’s easy to get lost in the firehose of data and obsess, but I’ve personally found that all the data the scale gives me helps a lot. Even if the scale ticks up, I can see that it’s because my muscle measurements are higher, or my water weight is up. And sometimes the scale is flat, but the body fat percentage has slid down a touch. You absolutely have to be very careful when using a suite of devices like this; no amount of weight loss should be at the expense of your mental or physical health.

What really makes these three Lepulse products interesting, though, is how well they work together. Individually, each one provides useful information, but when you combine the P1 scale, Smart Food Scale, and Smart Body Tape Measure through the Fitdays+ app, you get a much more complete picture of what’s happening with your body.

The P1 helps me understand how my weight, body fat, and muscle mass are changing, including what’s happening in specific areas of my body. The food scale gives me a closer look at what I’m eating, including calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat, while the tape measure helps me track physical changes that might not show up on the bathroom scale.

For someone like me who’s been working closely with a personal trainer, that’s incredibly useful. If I’m eating enough protein, keeping my calories in check, and working hard at the gym, I want to know whether that effort is paying off. Maybe my weight hasn’t budged much, but my body fat has dropped, my muscle mass has increased, and my waist is getting smaller. That’s progress I might have missed if I were only watching the number on a regular scale. Looking at my nutrition alongside my body composition and measurements also gives me more to discuss with my trainer when we decide whether to adjust my diet or workouts.

Of course, none of these gadgets can do the actual work for you, and having more data doesn’t automatically mean you’re making better decisions. But having all three tools working together makes it easier to spot trends, understand what’s working, and make thoughtful adjustments instead of guessing. That’s what I appreciate most about the Lepulse ecosystem. It takes three different parts of my fitness journey and helps me see how they fit together, without making progress tracking feel like a second full-time job.

Still, if you want to really peek under the hood and see what’s going on inside your body beyond just “weight and BMI”, you won’t find a better deal than the Lepulse products. The fact that they’re so close to a professional DEXA scan for such a low price is absolutely a technological marvel and one that should make the P1, if not the tape measure and scale, a key part of any health journey!

Source: Manufacturer-provided review samples

What I Liked: Price points for each product are phenomenal; The Body scale is nearly as accurate as a far more expensive DEXA scan; Can provide so many data points to help you understand your health journey; The food scale and tape measure integrate beautifully with the Fitdays+ app; Very easy to integrate the tools into your everyday life; Can help you move beyond just the number on the scale to better manage your goals

What Needs Improvement: Not specific to the hardware, but remember that these are just tools, and users should take care to make sure they don’t go down a rabbit hole of over-managing their health and eating to an unhealthy degree