Me, fit?

2009 just may be the year that I get in better shape. So far I’ve lost 10 pounds, thanks partially to two of my favorite gadgets — the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

On January 2, I began my fitness quest with a little iPhone application called Lose It. It helps me record the number of calories I eat each day and track weight loss (or gain). I can now see why years of eating Jack in the Box for breakfast (meaty breakfast burrito plus coke at 700 calories), Chick-Fil-A for lunch (sandwich, fries and coke for about 1100 calories) and Wendy’s for dinner (burger, fries and coke for another 1000) resulted in my packing on a few extra pounds.

Thanks to calorie counting, my weight chart is like the stock market in our bad economy — sure, it has days when it gains a few points, but the general trend is down, down, down.

A few weeks back Chel decided that the Nintendo Wii would be her early Valentine / birthday gift. She definitely wanted to play the old-school Mario Brothers games, but it was really more of a gift for me than for her. It’s been a lot of fun; we even took it to the farm and Mom and Dad got into the bowling, baseball and tennis.

It was all fun and games until last week, when the Wii Fit started calling me fat and inflated the midsection of my little character. The “balance board” it comes with is a scale that also measures your center of balance. Based on your height, weight and center of balance, it determines your Wii Fit age. My age has ranged from 34 (not too far off!) to 56 depending on the day.

The activities in Wii Fit have actually been pretty fun. You can do yoga (I now know the tree pose and sun salutation), “strength” training isometric exercises, aerobic activities like step aerobics, and balance games like slalom skiing. It’s definitely not a game, and it’s probably not a super-intense workout, but for a couch-slash-desk potato like myself, it’s been a good way to work a little activity into my life every morning. And it’s been fun enough that I’ve done it every day this week, unlike past attempts at exercise when I give up after a couple of times.

I guess I just want to see my poor little Wii Fit character lose his puffed-up midsection. And in the process, perhaps I will lose the real thing, as well.