Isaac Dunham pointed out that busybox diff only implements unified diffs, and sent a patch to convert bloatcheck to use that. I tweaked it a bit.
diff --git a/scripts/bloatcheck b/scripts/bloatcheck
index 03606b2..d18fbe0 100755
--- a/scripts/bloatcheck
+++ b/scripts/bloatcheck
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
   echo "-----------------------------------------------------------------------"
   while read a b c d
   do
-    THISNAME=$(echo " $d" | sed 's/[.][0-9]*$//')
+    THISNAME=$(echo "$d" | sed 's/[.][0-9]*$//')
 
     if [ "$LASTNAME" != "$THISNAME" ]
     then
@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@
     fi
 
     SIZE=$(printf "%d" "0x$b")
-    if [ "$a" == "<" ]
+    if [ "$a" == "-" ]
     then
       OLD=$(($OLD+$SIZE))
       SIZE=$((-1*$SIZE))
@@ -58,6 +58,6 @@
   printf "% 71d total\n" "$TOTAL"
 }
 
-diff <(nm --size-sort "$1" | sort -k3,3) \
-     <(nm --size-sort "$2" | sort -k3,3) | grep '^[<>]' | sort -k4,4 | \
-     do_bloatcheck
+diff -U 0 <(nm --size-sort "$1" | sort -k3,3) \
+     <(nm --size-sort "$2" | sort -k3,3) \
+     | tail -n +3 | sed -n 's/^\([-+]\)/\1 /p' | sort -k4,4 | do_bloatcheck