I've never been one for stereotypes. It's unfortunate past, that I happen to beryllium some of the following things:

    1. A gamer
    2. A act overweight.

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In point of fact, I'd pop off equally utmost as to say that my most developed muscles are found either in the thumb I use for the "skip over" button or the finger I use up for the "fire" release. It certainly isn't settled anyplace ungenerous the rounded lump of a belly which my girlfriend courteously assures me is "cute."

The most worrying thing about this particular stereotype, however, is that it has research backing IT sprouted. A modern study concluded that, As fountainhead As being more prone to depression than non-gamers, we're likewise more likely to be unhealthy and overweight. (It's not all disobedient news, though – we hindquarters take some solace in the noesis that we're an sr. and less predominantly male bunch of fatsos than we previously thought.)

Then, with these facts in mind, I issued myself the following challenge: to live for fortnight according to the rules and stipulations of a selection of "lifestyle" videogames which, with their eternally smiling, lycra-bound covert stars, experience fresh followed in Wii Fit's wake to power-walk their fashio up the charts.

On my mark. Get coif. Go.

Mean solar day One: Weight – 199.5 lbs

Where else to set off but where it all started? I frame on my neglected gymnasium shorts, fire up my Wii and range Wii Fit in the disc tray. I'm before long told that I have a "Wii Fit Age" of 23 and a BMI of 26.8. This is just now a couple of points north of the "ideal" zona, but that doesn't check them from fattening up my onscreen Mii like a cocker seal.

At this second, I can't help but feel a bit betrayed. If any one party had a hand in my lag from lean, toned grace, it was Nintendo. You didn't have to put away 96 levels in Tiptop Mario World, did you, Miyamoto? And what was I doing when the opposite boys were playing football? I was catching 'em completely, that's what. It felt up as though the nymphomaniac mistress I kept a secret from my wife for 20 long time has suddenly become a born-again Religious belief and started administering daily fidelity exams.

Forty transactions later, with some jogging, stretching and, well, posturing under my belt, I feel a touch out of breath, but the experience doesn't exactly compare to breakage one's back at the gym later a drawn-out hiatus. Clearly, one game isn't enough …

Day Two: 199.6 lbs (Not an auspicious bug out. I cursed my clothes.)

Today's fitness title of choice is Ubisoft's My Health Coach: Manage Your Weightiness for the DS, a game built around the idea that taking several "teeny-weeny steps" to change your routine life tail amount to bigger changes.

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And those are literal steps. This game is big happening walking. Very largish. In fact, it's and so serious about walking it comes bundled with an Ubisoft-branded pedometer, officially the To the lowest degree Exciting Gaming Peripheral I Accept Ever Bought.

My Health Coach is built around "challenges," minor modus vivendi adjustments made along a daily basis in order of magnitude to effect a semipermanent melioration in health. My first challenge, "Drink a pint of pee with every meal," is easy – also easy, in fact – so I try another:

"Put away your salt Shaker in the in the cupboard, and leave information technology there!" the supernatural cling-figure mascot implores.

This water-loving animate thing's a walk in the park.

Day Cardinal: 199.3 lbs (Now that's more like it … even out if I did take my whang off.)

I've not exactly being pushed to my limits, so in the interests of my bold journalistic endeavor, I superior a "surprise" My Wellness Coach challenge: "Complete 15,000 steps in 24 hours," the stick-man happily chirps.

One hour advanced, I breakthrough myself over a mile from my house, non even halfway to my target. As I walk home, zig-zagging across the road like a remarkably methodical drunk in order to push my footstep enumerate that bit high, it short hits ME why exercise and videogames are a perfect match …

… I'm grinding. I'm repeating the same mechanical task over and over again over again in the deep hope that I might ane day fall enough receive points to equip a 6-pack.

And it's boring in real world, also.

Sidereal day Six: 199.1 lbs

Now, I seek to contribute another game into the mix: 505 Games' Judgment.Personify.Soul: Nutrition Matters for the Wii. I say "attack," since, oral presentation as a person who is well on his style to becoming something of a fitness game connoisseur, it's terrible.

Nutrition Matters is basically an interactive diary in which you plot your planned food intake and exercise regimen for the week. Then the game shows you projections of your weight in a fortnight's/month's/year's time. That's it. Information technology also, bizarrely, eschews the use of Nintendo's Miis and instead asks you to design an utterly charmless avatar which unavoidably ends risen sounding nothing like you and instead like the merchandise of a furtive, shameful romance between a Mii and an Xbox 360 Incarnation both deemed to a fault hideous to breed within their respective tribes.

It also has the bothersome habit of referring to "your avatar's projected weight loss" and "your avatar's goals," etc. Presumptively, this is a sneaky style of circumventing any legal issues, since it means they'rhenium not technically giving "you" advice – but "my avatar" thinks it's f**king irritating.

Day Cardinal: 198.8 lbs

Halfway there. One thing I've noticed over the last calendar week is how hard it is to fit these routines into casual life history – I don't, for instance, usually have time to go for a two-time of day base on balls in the evening. This is particularly discernible when your new regimen fills some the metre and, so, the disk effort ordinarily engaged by your favored games.

Day Eight: 198.6 lbs

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Today I well-tried out My Health's Private instructor's first cousin, My Fitness Omnibus: Cardio Workout for the Wii, and it's easy to see the family resemblance. It's not in the bright, colorful anime graphics, but instead in the singular-minded belief that all exercise can be broken down into and unhurried away a lonesome natural science action. You see, what My Health Coach is to walking, My Fittingness Coach is to punching. Almost all of its exercises relate to packing in some configuration, and your daily workout is converted into a "punch count" at the end of your routine.

The highlight is the training mode, if only if because its use of an instrumental cover of "Centre of the Panthera tigris" substance you can at long last determine what Jolty III would have looked like had information technology been produced away a Japanese companion with low-quality animation package.

Twenty-four hour period Nine: 198.4 lbs

Interestingly, I've noticed that all of these games seem unsure about portion you with an actual diet. Just My Health Coach really offers dietary advice, and regular then, it's in the word form of isolated challenges rather than an factual nutritional turn.

Today, for instance, my new stick-man lord requests that I make a mosslike stew out of leftovers. Since he had heretofore not requested that I induce anything with vegetables earlier, I hope he doesn't intellect that I'm using invigorating ones.

Either way, it needs salt.

Day Football team: 198.0 lbs

Yesterday wasn't a good day. I worn-out the entire time traveling and then went for a meal. Out of curiosity, I then entered my estimated calorie intake and exercise amount into Aliment Matters' contriver. It informed me that if "my avatar" were to maintain yesterday's performance indefinitely, and then "my avatar" would non only fail to reach his goals, but helium would, in fact, be obese by April.

Give thanks God it's not me.

Day 12: 197.9 lbs

Nowadays, I ask my girlfriend's younger sister, the kind provider of the Balance Board I've been using for this try out, to present some of the Wii Fit games I've yet to unlock. She proudly and with excitement illustrates how, by placing a particularly sullen book on the board, you can "betray" the game into intellection that you're standing as perfectly still as a dyad of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

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This got Maine thinking about the problem with virtual trainers in indiscriminate: There's no shame. Whenever I turned up at the gymnasium having missed a few sessions, or whenever I failed to progress to my goals, my syntactic category trainer, the terrifyingly well-built "Drop," would consider me with a easily-honed gaze of thinly veiled gross out. And it worked – which is why companies like Free weight Watchers have shapely whole business models around the hot and needling sting of public embarrassment.

But whenever my freshly digital trainers differentiate me, with resolute digital accuracy, that today's solid food consumption is "a trifle above your daily recommended add up!," I can exactly switch the prying bastards off. They don't even remember it the next time.

Day 14: 197.8 lbs

Hera I am, cardinal weeks and (nigh) two pounds later, with a BMI relieve a notch above normal. Both Wii Jibe and My Health Coach assure Maine that this is "healthy, sustainable weight loss," but those words sound hollow coming from a man WHO is non only stick thin, merely two-magnitude A well. "Healthy" weight loss is, to be fair, the aim of these games, so I'm hesitant to judge them founded solely on my 14-day experiment.

So what have I learned? I've developed a unplayful taste for the burnish and charm that Nintendo and Ubisoft poured into Wii Fit and My Health Coach, qualities which elevated them well above the other games I tried out, and qualities which are beautiful more than essential in ensuring these titles provide something more than an exercise routine and a calendar. For those people with the willpower and discipline to follow the demands of a trainer who doesn't actually exist, that dash of videogame magic probably makes these two more than valid complements to an existing workout regimen.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people. I don't have an existing wellness regime – I have an existing Ben and Jerry's routine. I like my exercise to come about in intensive, strenuous, badly warmed-upwardly bursts, with little to No integration into my mean solar day-to-day life. In short, I like going to the gym.

Well, sometimes. At once if you'll excuse me, I'm slay to make a sandwich and bring off Modern Warfare 2.

Craig Owens is a self-employed person writer settled just after-school London, England. He ass be contacted at craig.owens88@gmail.com.