Wow! Look at this athletic amputee on an exercise machine with a Wii, Xbox, beer bottles and a stapler. She must be a weight loss expert!

Face it, you’re fat.

I know, you didn’t used to be that way. At the end of last summer you were still lean and trim and the picture of perfect health. But now it’s a year later and you try to look at yourself in the mirror only to find that you no longer fit in the mirror.

It looks like you’ve had about ten thousand too many eggnogs over Christmas and enough chocolate bunnies to keep Cadbury thriving well into the next century. I know, you didn’t mean to eat that much, but you didn’t want to be rude. You couldn’t just say, “No thanks, Aunt Mary, I think I’ll pass on that second helping of apple pie.” Instead you said, “I’ll take two more spoonfuls of butter in my coffee, please!”

Face it, you make Queen Latifa look like Nicole Richie. You make Roseanne Barr look like Mary-Kate Olsen after three hours in the bathroom. You make… well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately losing weight is not like losing your car keys. You can’t just wake up one morning and suddenly find that 30 pounds is missing. “Now where did I put that weight? Did I leave it on the table in the hall?” you’d say. Then you’d look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Who cares? But where are my car keys?” If this were the case there would be an awful lot of skinny people stuck taking the bus everywhere.

Weight-loss is much more complex than that. As a qualified weight specialist (who is better qualified than a fat person) I feel it is my duty to inform you of some of the ways you can lose weight:

ExerFlexerCyberMaxizerFlex Method - You could go out and spend a year’s worth of mortgage payments on a home exercise machine that has the word flex somewhere in its name. While most of these home machines resemble an exhibit from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, many of them will help you reach your personal goals - if your personal goals include looking ridiculous while exercising and having a really expensive clothes rack shoved in the spare bedroom after three months.

Wii Your Fat Away - You could try losing weight by playing one of the new console video game systems. With the Playstation 3 you can build muscle by just leaving it the box and carrying it around the house. With the Nintendo Wii you can spend all your time running around from store to store trying to find one. And with the Microsoft Xbox 360 you can burn calories by yelling at people about how you don’t want a Playstation 3 or a Nintento Wii.

Fantastic Plastic You - You might want to look into reconstructive surgery. If they can make Dick Clark 30 years younger and Michael Jackson look like he’s from 30 light years away, then they can definately make you look 30 pounds lighter.

Office Max Method - Going for stomach stapling surgery is just too expensive and takes too long. Try doing it yourself by swallowing a small Swingline and punching yourself in the gut repeatedly to try to staple your stomach smaller from the inside. If that doesn’t you can try the other popular method for making your stomach smaller: swallow a box of rubber bands practice yoga until you can tie your stomach off just right.

It’s All Relative - You could just forget about the weight loss and begin wearing clothing with vertical stripes and hanging out with people much fatter than you. Soon you’ll soon be referred to as “the skinny one” even though you still take up three seats in the movie theater.

The Six-Pack Diet - This is a variation on the various liquid diets available. To make it more palatable you should probably pick a liquid you actually will enjoy drinking. I suggest beer. But remember to keep some variety in your diet: have domestic one day and import the next.

Lose 20 Pounds in 20 Minutes - For really quick weight loss I suggest amputating something, preferably something you have two of.

Freezy Does It Diet - You could sign up at one of those weight-loss centers where you pay outrageous prices for frozen food in a box. We used to call them crappy TV dinners but now they are specially formulated health supplement meal plans because nothing sounds more appetizing than eating something that’s been “formulated.”

Mount Olympus Fitness Center - You could join one of the numerous health clubs that are constantly advertised on television by men and women who possess bodies that make the Greek gods look fat and dumpy. These models have muscles upon muscles and the only fat they possess is stuffed into their skimpy loincloths. These are people who were born tanned and oiled. The health clubs claim that exercising 30 minutes a day, 3 days a week can make you look like that. I’d say that even plastic surgery 30 minutes a day, 3 days a week couldn’t make me look like that. Judging from the commercials I am led to believe that fat people are not actually allowed into these clubs.

If none of these methods work for you then maybe should once again attempt the tried and true method of a healthy diet combined with daily exercise.

Personally, I’m looking for some fat Wii players who like drinking beer and eating TV dinners.

2 Comments » | Email Link

I have officially completed my 30 Day Wii Exercise Experiment in which I spent approximately 30 minutes each day playing the Nintendo Wii (mostly Wii Sports) while wearing a four-pound wrist weight on each arm. During this time period I also tried to eat a healthy somewhat lower calorie diet than I was used to. I also tried to walk at least 5,000 steps every day.

Stats and Results
Starting Weight: 269.2 pounds
Ending Weight: 252.8
Total Weight Lost: 16.4 pounds!
Average Daily Wii Time: 33.1 minutes per day
Average Daily Calories: 1986
Average Daily Steps: 4619
Wii Fitness Age Low: 25
Wii Fitness Age High: 52

How I Felt After Each Workout
At the end of each session I was usually a little out of breath, sweaty and moderately tired. I’d felt as though I’d had a good, healthy but not exhausting workout. Some days I struggled through the 30 minutes, but most days I was having enough fun that I barely noticed the time going by. This was the longest stretch of consecutive days I think I have ever exercised and I found myself actually wanting to play more than just the time I had allotted most days.

Differences In Wii Sports Games
Boxing and Tennis definitely require the most activity and definitely seem to burn the most calories. The action in both of them is fairly constant, with only a few real pauses in the action. Tennis volleys can go on for three or four fast-paced minutes and boxing only has a small pause between rounds and when there is a knock down. Bowling, Baseball and Golf seem to have too many small breaks in the action. Some of the Wii Sports training modes are short, but can keep you moving for short bursts of time.

Wrist Weight Observations

The wrist weights definitely made a large difference in my activity level. Four pounds doesn’t seem like much until you have to hold that weight up and swing it around for 30 minutes straight. I always tried to at least keep my arms at waist level and never just let them dangle.

I could definitely feel a difference in my arms at the end of the 30 days. While I was initially fearing an increased chance of injury by “throwing out” on of my joints I soon found myself compensating and moving my arms in ways that didn’t thrust them out and risking a nasty case of “Wii elbow.” It’s really not much different than swinging a real bat or tennis racket. The weights really add to exhaustion factor of playing the Wii, especially with games like Wii Boxing and a few of the Rayman Raving Rabids games that require lots of very fast motion.

I played a few tennis matches without the weights and found that I barely worked up a sweat at all. More weight would definitely mean a more taxing workout. I’m sure I could get a pretty sgood workout without the weights, but I would have to play a lot more than 30 minutes each day. Towards the end I found myself wanting to add even more resistance.

Importance of Diet
While the Wii does provide a good means for exercise and it is a lot of fun, I’m not sure how many calories it really burns. The wrist weights definitely helped me burn calories, but my lower calorie diet also helped with the weight loss. If I wanted to lose weight without modifying diet I really feel as though I would have to play for longer than 30 minutes each day or significantly increase the weight resistance. Playing Wii Tennis for 30 minutes while eating a Big Mac every day for lunch will probably not lead to much weight loss.

Overall Conclusions
Playing the Nintendo Wii, and especially Wii Sports, is a great way to get kids and adults alike to be more active and to burn a few extra calories. You get out of it what you put into it. If you jump around the room and wave your arms wildly and play for extended periods of time and even add resistance with weights then you’ll undoubtedly burn a lot more calories.

Right now Wii Sports seems to be the runaway winner for getting people up off the couch and sweating to the Wii. People just naturally move their entire body when playing these familiar sports games. Most of the other Wii games I’ve played and read about require short bursts of activity with a lot of pauses between the action or very little real arm movement required.

The fact that the Nintendo Wii can keep my interest through a tiring workout and keep me coming back for more each morning is a true testament Nintendo’s revolutionary and long-overdue view of the potential in video games.

What’s Next?
I’m going to continue my weight loss with video game experiments with other systems, not just the Nintendo Wii. I’ve decided to continue this experiment at its own domain: http://www.VideoGameFitness.net.

No Comments » | Email Link

I’m coming down the home stretch of my 30 day Wii Exercise Experiment. For the past 25 days I have worn wrist weights while playing Wii Sports at least 30 minutes each day. I’m hoping to have my final results posted on January 30th, so check back.

So far I can confidently say that I’ve lost more weight than Mickey DeLorenzo, though to be fair, I should mention that I started out with 80 pounds to lose and started out with… five? I think I’ve also made a decision about what I’ll do after the 30 days are up, but I’ll post more about that in the final results.

For now I just want to mention that Wii Sports Tennis is a darn fine game not because it’s fun and gets you moving, but because the skill level in Tennis always seems just perfectly match my playing skills. For the past week or so I’ve been neck and neck with the computer player through all of my matches, left-handed and right-handed. I play the “5 out of 5″ option and almost every single game has come down the last 5th match and often down to just a point or two one way or the other.

I’m consistently having long volleys, getting fun gameplay and a decent workout by the end of each game. That alone makes Nintendo a top-notch game company in my book.

1 Comment » | Email Link