The Wii Fit Review: Six Months Later

November 15th, 2008, 00:59 Posted By: wraggster

I've used Wii Fit exactly 6 months. Since the review, I didn't use it every day, or even every week, but since the very first time the game told me I was fat, it never really left my mind. Every meal, every time I passed on exercise to eat a little more ice cream, every time I exercised but stopped a little early, I heard those words resonating through the bit of side blubber on my sleight frame: "You're Overweight!"

I hate Wii fit so much. Sure, it indirectly helped me lose 10 pounds, but I f'ing hate it.

Bear with me on this long post with minimal mention of the game or hardware — the game is not what will make you fit.

Over a few sessions of playing the game, I started what would eventually be, more or less, the kind of body obsession assumed normal for performance athletes and underwear models, coupled with the kind of inferiority complex that one gets when you can't beat a video game, coupled with the resentment one builds towards machines that don't do your meatbot bidding. I mean, I could have dismissed the measurement tell me I was fat — BMI (Body Mass Index) is a crude stat based on height and weight that can't tell a fat person from a really really muscular medium husky guy. The problem is, Wii fit doesn't give a crap about your excuses or perceptions either. It assumed I really wasn't that muscular short guy, it assumed I was a medium husky with a little belly. And it was right.

I did all the exercises, focusing on the harder ones like the pushup and plank exercises, jackknives, the shadow boxing and running in place for sessions, usually for over 45 minutes. But then I got bored of EVERYTHING IN the game and couldn't stand to do more than one or two at a time. And I was not losing weight. I was exercising, it seemed, just enough to stimulate my appetite and give me justification for eating more, and so I was actually gaining weight. The in game scale told me as much.

When you're stuck on a level in a video game, some people look at strategy guides or cheats. The Wii Fit equivalent of this, knowing I was not getting the weaponry to obliterate my chub in the game, was to cheat by resorting to outside exercises like hitting the weights, and bicycling, running and hitting the rowing machine, my favorite for quick nearly full body exercises. This helped, and Wii fit's seemingly lame exercises were great setup in developing the necessary support muscles from head to toe to support rudimentary training — it was like physical therapy for computer nerds about to enter real sporting tasks.

Summer ended. Snowboarding season was approaching, and I knew I wanted to be lighter on my feet this year. It was great to have a goal outside of the game's mere quest for proper height to weight ratio.

http://gizmodo.com/5083987/the-wii-f...x-months-later

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