apparent weight
Your true weight is the gravitational force on you, m g, and it barely changes from moment to moment. Yet you can feel heavier or lighter: in a lift that jerks upward you feel pressed into the floor, and as it slows near the top you feel light. What is changing is your apparent weight, the weight you actually feel and that a scale actually reads.
Apparent weight is the size of the support force pushing up on you, usually the normal force N from the floor or seat. Analyse a person in a lift with Newton's second law: if the lift accelerates upward with acceleration a, then N - m g = m a, so N = m (g + a) and you feel heavier. If it accelerates downward, N = m (g - a) and you feel lighter. In genuine free fall a equals g, so N = 0 and your apparent weight is zero, which is weightlessness.
The distinction matters because a bathroom scale never measures the gravitational pull directly; it measures the force you press on it with, which is your apparent weight. On solid unmoving ground the two happen to agree, N = m g, which is why we usually get away with treating them as the same. But in an accelerating lift, a launching rocket, or an orbiting spacecraft, apparent weight and true weight part ways.
A 70 kg person (true weight m g = 686 N) in a lift accelerating upward at 2 m/s^2 has apparent weight N = m (g + a) = 70 x (9.8 + 2) = 826 N, so the scale reads about 20 percent high. In free fall it would read 0.
The scale tracks the support force N, not the gravitational pull; acceleration is what drives the two apart.
A scale reads apparent weight (the support/normal force), not true weight m g; they coincide only when you are not accelerating vertically.