Losing Weight

Wii Fit can be a great tool to help you lose weight and meet your other fitness goals. But what about the nutritional aspect? While Fit offers some tips, it’s good to arm yourself with as much information as possible about eating properly for weight loss. Check in with your doctor and discuss your desire to lose weight with him or her. S/he will ensure you are healthy enough for exercise and can even point you in the right direction as far as eating and calorie consumption goes.

You’ve heard that weight loss is as easy as expending more calories than you consume. While this is true, simple math doesn’t quite tell the whole story. WHAT and WHEN you eat can be just as important as how many calories you eat. Say you are a woman and your doctor gives you a recommend caloric intake of 1600 calories in order to lose weight. Obviously if you eat 1600 calories-worth of doughnuts, candy, and soda, you’re not doing yourself any favors. A varied fiber-rich diet of proteins, vegetable, fruits, and “good” carbs like beans is a much better way to get your day’s calories. You’ll also want to keep you metabolism going by consuming 5-6 smaller meals throughout the day rather than the three big traditional meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Try to avoid drinking your calories as well but rather opt for fresh water. Stay hydrated!

There are technological devices available to help you track your daily caloric consumption. One that is featured in the hit show, Biggest Loser, is called the Bodybugg by Apex Fitness. In a nutshell, the Bodybugg uses four sensors, as well as the users age, sex, weight, and height to estimate how much energy he or she expends daily. If you have a hard time or can’t be bothered with counting your calories or estimating how many you’ve burned on a given day, this device can be a real asset.

If you find it hard to carve thirty minutes of time from your day to exercise, know that a TOTAL of thirty minutes is what matters. That means you can do ten minutes here and ten minutes there when it’s convenient for you. Also, make sure you lose weight slowly so your goal weight is easier to maintain once you reach it. Once you do, maintain a healthy, nutritious diet and exercise regime and be your at your very best!

Fitness Basics
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Do you know how many calories you are supposed to get in a day in order to maintain your fitness?� Do you know how many you need in order to lose?� The number of calories a person’s body burns naturally over the course of a day is called the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR.)� This number is the “magic number” for keeping equilibrium within your body.� If you eat above this number, you will store the extra calories, i.e. gain weight.� If you don’t eat this number, your body will have to burn the fuel that’s already been stored: fat.�

����������� There are a few caveats to this rule, and every body is different, but the idea is still the same: watching your calories in versus calories out is the way to be healthy.� Did you know that in order to burn the energy (calories) in a small candy-coated chocolate button you would have to briskly walk the length of a football field one time?� How many of those delicious candies are in a whole package?� That’s a lot of walking!� Having a treat once in a while is perfectly fine, but all things should be taken in moderation.� If you make the choice to eat these foods, it’s your responsibility to your body to work off that fuel so it’s not stored as fat.� In short, your activity level should equal that of your food intake for good fitness.

Being active in order to be healthy may seem difficult for some people, but it is mostly about doing the math.� There are approximately 3,500 calories in one pound of fat.� With this knowledge, we can eat 500 calories a day less than our BMR and burn one pound of fat each week in a steady, controlled, and safe way.� It’s very healthy to aim for losing one to two pounds a week.� Don’t despair if you’re not seeing results as fast as you’d like.� The slower the weight comes off, the more likely it is to stay off in the future!

Engaging in activity is a necessary part of being fit and there are lots of other advantages to being fit besides losing weight (which is a biggie for most of us!)� Your heart is a muscle just like all the other muscles in your body.� In order for it to get stronger, you need to work it out.� It may sound silly, but cardiovascular exercises like walking or jumping rope strengthen your heart by making it work just a little bit harder than it has to normally.� As the heart gets stronger, its ability to pump blood and fight off disease increases, leaving you healthier.�

Your bones and organs also benefit from being active.� Everything in your body is stronger with regular exercise and you can see the benefits throughout the day.� You’ll wake up refreshed and feel ready to take on the day.� You’ll go through your day with all the energy you need to perform your daily tasks.� Your body is more able to fight off sickness and disease.� Then, at night, you will sleep better and be ready to start all over again the next day.

The benefits of staying active far outweigh the slight disadvantages such as time constraints, cost, etc.� Encourage those around you to be healthy and active and they in turn will encourage you to continue to do so.� Hopefully the trend towards obesity will take a turn toward healthier trends and we will see a more active America in the near future.

Exercise Meets Video Games: Exergaming

Video game enthusiasts the world over have been trying for decades to find a way to make playing video games productive as well as being highly entertaining. Even as early as the infancy of virtual reality in the 1980s programmers were beginning to explore the merging of activity with entertainment. Now this phenomenon has come to be known to the cutting edge video gamer as "exergaming," a combination of exercise and video gaming. Two systems developed by Autodesk are credited with the founding of this innovative concept. A racquet sport simulator called Virtual racquetball allowed users to hold and manipulate an actual racquet that could report the position of a virtual ball that was struck with it. The game system was intended for use by multiple players simultaneously using a phone line, and players were even able to enhance the experience with an accessory used as a head mounted display. The HighCycle was another system designed by Autodesk, and it included an exercise bike connected to correlate the speed of the user’s pedaling with the moving virtual landscape on the screen. These first forays into the world of exergaming broke ground in a genre that not long ago would have been considered complete science fiction.

Nintendo was quick to join in with a system designed to operate on its NES that could monitor information like power expenditure and pedaling cadence. This product gained interest among the elite athlete set, and several generations later, the product now runs from Microsoft Windows software and uses much more sophisticated measurements and features to track an athlete’s performance. Virtually every video game developer since has tried in some way to cash in on the consumer’s desire to make exercise fun and entertaining. Still, because of their price tags, these kinds of solutions were out of reach for many of the people purchasing entertainment systems.

Exergaming got its first big break with the launch of the wildly popular Dance Dance Revolution by Konami. The Dance Dance Revolution franchise continues to see success both in the United States and abroad, as gamers burn calories as they score points by stepping on panels that correspond with arrows on the screen. Seven years later, the EyeToy: Kinetic was born, and it became the first hardware product to use the physical movements of the gamer exclusively to manipulate the game’s controls. In 2006, Nintendo again surged ahead in the race for entertaining exercise with the Wii which utilizes players motions as they hold the Wii Remote to control game play. The Wii Fit, released in 2007 in Japan and scheduled for release later this year in the States, uses a novel peripheral called the Wii Balance Board to get gamers moving in dozens of different ways, from balancing on the board, to performing push ups and yoga poses.

While the gyms aren’t quite ready to close down over this growing trend, it is worth noting that gamers are in fact increasing their activity in an effective way using some of the new exergaming technology that is becoming available. The next time you are putting off that walk around the block or trip to the gym, think about your entertainment options for exercise. Your next workout may just be as close as your television set.