Trimming Lbs. on the Wii diet
By George Gardner
The concept is similar to Nintendo’s Brain Age; except your loosing weight rather than gaining wits. A blogger by the name of hey_suburbia on Wiinintendo.net was playing Wii sports 6 weeks ago and noticed he was getting a pretty hefty workout; this led him to perform an experiment to see exactly how much weight he could loose over the course of a month and a half.
The rules were that he would do everything as he normally did, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping; but he must play Wii Sports 30 minutes per day. During his six week experiment, he was to keep track of measurable body fitness such as weight, heart rate, and body fat percentage.
After the six week period, which ended on January 15, he lost nearly 2% of his body fat, lowered his heart rate by 14bpm, and lost 9 pounds!
This may not sound like much, but loosing 9 lbs. in 6 weeks from a 181 lb. man is quite an accomplishment. The weight lost would have been substantially more from an overweight person.
Among the many mini-games within Wii Sports, hey_suburbia claims Boxing was the most effective, “I burned and average of 125 calories during a 15 minute period. I would like to point out that I would punch with full power, move as if I were really dodging, and hoped/bounced around like a real boxer would.”
Other bloggers are also documenting their own similar experiments; S. Warley from workoutwithwii.com has launched his own site dedicated to working out with the Wii, and even includes a couple tips on how to use this method more efficiently. S. Warley has more weight to loose; yet, he has only lost a few pounds in the last 2 weeks.
Tom Coffee from spillingcoffee.com has also launched a slightly different approach; he will be playing his Wii while wearing wrist weights along with healthier eating and walking every day.
It’s obvious that one could loose weight by committing to an active diet over the course of a month; but committing to a video game sure is easier than a treadmill, yet probably not as effective.
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January 17th, 2007
Whatever is takes! Competition, which video games supply, can be a great motivator. If it keeps you coming back and getting more exercise than you would get otherwise, it’s an improvement.
September 9th, 2007
Hi, your article was informative. I was wondering whether you passed high school English class. Your spelling of “hoping” rather than “hopping” might pass for a typo, but your use of “loose” for “lose” or “loosing” instead of “losing” is rather poor. And your use of the semi-colon to separate your clauses is also indicative of poor English grammar. It doesn’t really matter, but again, your job is writing. At the least, you could propagate some standards of English.