Furthering my resolve, I tracked down the scale in my house and discovered that I weighed in at 249 pounds. I'm 5'9"; last, I remembered, I weighed 158 pounds when I graduated back in 1995. 249 was completely unacceptable to me and I immediately started looking for solutions.
Coincidently, the Wii videogame fitness craze was starting this same time, so I went out and bought a Wii and a Wii Fit bundle (game and "balance board").
Initially, I did see results with Wii Fit. However, as any health expert will tell you, diet is just as important as exercise, and I attributed my early weight loss to cutting out the large amount of pop and potato chips I'd routinely enjoyed as well as cutting down on portion sizes of regular meals.
This isn't to say that Wii Fit wasn't effective - quite the contrary: If it wasn't for Wii Fit, at least as a motivator if not an exercise regimen, I don't think I'd be writing this article.
In fact, being able to weigh myself with the Wii Fit Balance Board and have that information put on a chart as a visual aid that I could regularly monitor was invaluable. There were times when I would put on weight despite my efforts - which normally would be toxically demoralizing for me. However, as my progress was graphed out, I could see that I was losing a bunch of weight (5 or 6 pounds), putting on a few pounds (2 or 3), and then losing another 5 to 6 pounds. Wii Fit's charting mechanisms showed net weight loss over time, and this kept me motivated to continue with my exercise/diet plan.
And then EA Sports Active hit the market and it was exactly what I was looking for. Also a exercise game, Active's "just stand up and do it" style spoke to me while the no-nonsense, ready-made routines of its 30 Day Challenge made me not want to miss a day. In November, after 5 months with EA Sports Active (and missing only one day), I reached my goal weight of 180 pounds with an average weight loss of 9 pounds per month.
Since then I've been able to maintain this weight through healthy lifestyle choices alone, so the desire to pick up EA Sports' fitness game sequel, awkwardly dubbed Active More Workouts, just isn't there for me - though I admit I'm curious about how effective the new abs routine would work for me.
But I can't stress enough how important diet was to the whole process - and still is. And I don't mean dieting, I mean the common sense food choices that are one's daily diet, the noun. Without changing your diet, weight loss probably isn't going to happen, nor is maintaining lost weight. Again, I'm no health expert, but I'm pretty big on the whole "common sense" thing.
But if you're conscious about your weight and motivated to do something about it, I would highly recommend looking into a Wii videogame solution. I mean, with costly "dieting programs" and/or "personal trainers" as a comparative option, the one time fee for a fitness game (and maybe a Wii console if you don't already own one) makes much more sense, financially... especially because it works. Well, works for one pop-swilling, potato chip-munching, huge-portion gamer with sedentary lifestyle, anyway. But if that sounds familiar, and you can take care of no-brainer food choices on your own, then you've got nothing to lose with a videogame fitness routine visually mapping out your weight loss goals and providing the physical routines to achieve them. Nothing to lose besides the weight, that is.
- [Editor's Note: Image of generic guy playing EA Sports Active provided by EA Sports. That's not Craig.]
