Weight Loss with Wii Fitness Games and Nutrisystem

I’m not a big site, but already I’ve seen what overzealous lawyers can do to a site. When I posted my review of a major release last year, I did my usual thing and posted a long review and some YouTube videos of my gameplay.

The next day I came back to the site and found that my YouTube account, which had hundreds of videos and thousands of followers, was in the process of being taken down due to “copyright infringement”. I was flabbergasted. Here I was giving positive free publicity to this company, but they wanted to shut me down. And of course, my silly little videos of Stii-Wii shaking his booty didn’t infringe on anyone’s copyright nor prevent anyone from buying the game–to the contrary, I know for a fact that hundreds if not thousands of people ended up buying it because of me.

I wrote in desperation to the legal department at the company who was trying to shut me down. No response. I wrote to their Marketing department. No response. I wrote to the publisher. No response. The clock was ticking and soon the years of time and literally sweat I put into my YouTube Channel would be gone.

Thankfully, I knew enough to file a counterclaim, and knew all about fair use and copyright law. But that’s just because I’m a computer geek. Most bloggers would have given in.

Don’t get me wrong–I understand the reasons behind SOPA and PIPA. The United States hardly produces anything anymore…tragically we don’t manufacture TVs or electronics or pharmaceuticals or practically anything. The only thing we still produce is entertainment like movies and video games, and yes, thieves are stealing them and getting rich by selling them for pennies on the dollar or giving them away for free and benefitting from online advertising. So in a sense, one of the last vestiges of our gross national product is under assault by thieves and counterfeiters from China to Eastern Europe.

I have indeed been the victim of copyright infringement myself. A few years ago, I found an offshore site that copied all the hard work I’d done on my site (as little and inconsequential as it is) and serving it up as its own. So yes, I see the rationale behind these laws. But the way they’re implemented is flawed. It would essentially deputize sites like Google and GoDaddy to become arms of the FBI. Any lawyer anywhere can take down any site just by complaining about it; you are guilty until proven innocent. This threatens every site from YouTube and Wikipedia to his one. Read more about it here.

The US Congress and presumably the President who would end up signing this bill Have good intentions but are under a delusion that this bill will solve more problems than it creates in its present form. I always marvel at our politicians who triumphantly sign bills that are supposed to help we consumers and never realizing that the bill only ends up making lawyers rich, giving bureaucrats busywork to do, and empowering lobbyists in all industries to continue buying off their favorite politicians, left and right…and not even solving the original problem it was supposed to.

I agree…there oughtta be a law. But just not this one.

I notice that people love to visit this site the day after Christmas. I always wondered why, and then it hit me. People get Wiis and Xboxes and PS3s for Christmas, and they also happen to enjoy their share of candy, cookies, and turkey. The confluence of events means a lot of searches for “Wii Fitness Games” and “Wii Exercise Games” the next day.

Well, you’re in luck. I’ve been reviewing Wii fitness games for almost three years now. Over the years there have been some spectacular ones and plenty of duds. Here on Nutwiisystem.com we try to review all of them. You’ll see an unbiased review here on the blog, and you can also go to our list of the best Wii exercise games to see the best of the best.

One question I hear a lot is, is it really possible to lose weight using video games? The answer I always give is the same one. Yes, but only if you STICK to it and really put all of your energy into it. In other words, sitting on a sofa playing Super Mario Kart is probably not going to do it for you. But if you get off the couch and dance with all your energy to Just Dance 3 or stick to the predetermined schedule of EA Sports Active 2, as long as you’re breaking a sweat and your heartrate is elevated for a good 20 minutes, and you’re controlling your portions while you eat, you WILL lose weight.

So take the rest of the four days off, but starting on January 1, 2012, let’s make a resolution to jump, dance, and Wii our way to fitness!

Here’s some late breaking news! Best Buy is holding an after-Xmas sale with some great prices on lots of new games in our top 10 list, including Just Dance 3 and Zumba Fitness 2. Best Buy has certainly been the retailer to beat this year, so kudos to them for setting the bar with great prices this year. Click here to see the sale…

Well, for those of you have are regular readers of the blog, you’ll remember that way back on January 13 I started the EA Sports Active 9 Week Program. We also started a EA Sports Exercise Group, NutWiiSys, at the same time.

You may notice that I never finished it. With two workouts to go, I got the flu. Then, I recovered from the flu and scraped up my knee biking. That put me out of commission for a few weeks. Then, life just got crazy busy. Those two remaining workouts never quite happened. And yes, I started to put on weight again

Long story short, today I started up EA Sports Active 2 for the first time since then. I was greeted with the following screen.

Yes, it looks like EA Sports Active 2 got tired of waiting for me, so it told me I was done and gave me this lovely trophy. It’s beautiful, but also just a hair empty because I regret not being able to really finish what I started. While it’s a bit embarrassing for me to admit, I post it here just to let you know that even though I run this site, I do deal with the same challenges myself!

Well, something else happened in these 29 weeks. I asked my girlfriend Lisa to marry me, and by some miracle she said yes! Lisa is an active (and tiny) person who loves volleyball and hiking, so fittingly (pun not really intended), I took her to her favorite hiking trail, Breakneck Ridge in New York, and when we got to the top, I fell to my knees and asked her (I literally fell to my knees–that is a rough trail).

Now if you’ve ever heard the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat (the guy who could eat no fat) and his wife (the one who could eat no lean), Lisa would be Jack and I would be the wife. When we go to restaurants, I usually finish my plate, and then finish all of her plate except for the one or two bites she took.

Now Lisa is the sweetest thing on earth–she’s always told me that she “like chubby guys”. On the other hand, because she’s concerned about my health she’s been dropping hints lately. This culminated in a challenge: could I lose 25 pounds by our wedding.

While we don’t have a date set yet, I’ve decided to take her up on her challenge. And so, I will be starting up again. I think this time I’ll use NFL Training Camp, which I paid $60 for and never used (it’s down to $25 now). There’s a 60 day challenge, so hopefully this time nothing will get in my way!

One thing I never did was to THANK the members of the NutWiiSys EA Sports group. Until the flu and the bike incident, you guys were GREAT motivation for me. I am so proud of what we accomplished as a group. The latest stats are:

1) We ran a total of 119 MILES!
2) We completed 198 workouts
3) We worked out for 95 hours and 13 minutes
4) We burned 37,062 calories!

I see that some of you are still going, even though I’ve fallen off the wagon. Maiphp, keep up the great work! Holythorn, congrats for finishing the 9 week program before I did

Sadly, EA Sports won’t let me track my NFL Training Camp stats in the EA Sports Active 2 group. But if anyone has NFL Training Camp and would like to work out alongside of me, let me know and I’ll set up another group!

In any case, I will keep you informed of my progress. Wish me luck!

Something I’ve had on my mind to do for a while has been to launch a discussion forum where we can talk about Wii fitness. On our site’s most popular page, the 10 Best Wii Fitness Games page, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks have been leaving comments and questions not just about the top 10 games, but also about other topics of interest, such as the best games for kids, the best games for multiple players, the best low-impact games, and more great questions.

So, if you have a burning question about Wii Fitness games, come on over to the brand new forum. You can post as a guest or register as a user.

http://www.nutwiisystem.com/forum/index.php?a=vforum&f=8

I’ll do my best to answer whatever questions you have, and of course, I encourage you to chime in to help your fellow Wii fitness fans with theirs. Enjoy!

Hey everyone,

To my shock, it’s been over a month since I last posted. Where I last left off, I had a small number of exercise dates to go with EA Sports Active 2, and then I got the flu, followed by a nasty cough. I eventually recovered from that, but then things got busy at work. And then spring came, and I started riding my bike. And then I rode into a pothole and flipped over, getting bumps and bruises and lots of soreness and two skinned knees (thanks Queens, NY) which meant weeks before I could exercise again.

I guess in some ironic way, it’s fitting that I write a diet and exercise blog and fell off the wagon. Well, here I am climbing on again. In the coming weeks I’ll be finishing what I started with EA Sports Active 2 (albeit a month and change late), and I’ll be figuring out what Wii workout game to tackle for the next round.

In addition, I’ll be resuming my review of Wii exercise games. There haven’t been much of late, but I have been sitting on EA Sports NFL Training Camp and Michael Jackson: The Experience for a while, so I’ll have my usual in-depth reviews of those. In addition, the games Fit in Six and ExerBeat have been or will shortly be released, so I’ll be reviewing those as well.

I haven’t logged in to our group’s EA Sports Active account in a while, I hope the rest of the team has been a bit more active than I have been? I start again now

Addendum as of 5/16/11: wouldn’t you know it, but days after I typed this, my scraped knee got infected and turned into bursitis. Thank God, I’m okay. But it was a painful time when even bending my knee was excruciatingly painful. After some antibiotics the swelling has gone down, but it pushed back my exercise routine yet a few more weeks

So, for those of you who have been doing the math, this week was to have been my ninth week in my EA Sports Active 2 9-week workout. I have been fastidiously keeping to the Monday-Tuesday-Thursday-Friday schedule set by EA Sports Active 2, even to the point of doing double workouts on weekend days to make up for missed workouts and, as you’ve seen, taking my Wii with me to all parts of the country when travelling.

Well, last Friday I had that “oh, no, I’m coming down with something” feeling. Sure enough, by Sunday I was in bed with a big fever, body aches, and chills.

Those three remaining workouts (Friday, Monday, and Tuesday) were almost mocking me. I thought to myself…should I just buck it up and make it through those workouts? Hey, maybe sweating will even help my body fight the infection and clear my fever faster, right?

After looking it up online, the answer was clear.  It’s a bad, bad idea to work out with the flu. While working out when you’re healthy can help your body build up its immune system, once you get the flu, it’s time to stop and let your body do its thing without getting in its way. Trying to exercise in the middle of an illness may make you sweat more, but it’ll also weaken your body’s ability to fight what’s going on inside it, and may dehydrate you to boot, at a time when your body needs hydration (there’s a reason everyone always tells you “drink plenty of liquids”).

Happily, as of this writing (Thursday), the fever has passed, although now I’m stuck with a bad bronchial infection. So I’ll be taking it easy for a little while.

The one thing I do NOT know is, will EA Sports Active 2 let me pick up where I left off, let me finish the last three workouts, and “count it” as a completed program? Or will it tell me “tough luck…the last 8 1/2 weeks of work don’t count and you’ll have to start all over again?

We shall see when I’m ready to start exercising again (hopefully in a week or so). In a meantime, just repeating a plea to the developers of EA Sports Active 2: PLEASE let us adjust the individual days on our own workout schedules once they’re set!

In other news, I noticed that our NutWiiSys group on EA Sports Active has just surpassed a total distance of 115 miles run. Way to go, team!

UPDATED 7/25/11

My original title to this post was going to be “my workout yesterday was a snap!” But I figured I’d go with a more direct title.

I’ve been using the same resistance band since I first opened my original EA Sports Active box in 2009. Yesterday while doing my workout on EA Sports Active 2, the inevitable happened–it snapped right in my face. (EA Sports can rest assured I won’t be pressing charges–happily, the resistance band was so flimsy in the first place it could not possibly have inflicted damage. Plus, the thing had been fraying for a long time, so out of sheer curiosity I kept using it until it finally snapped).

If you read my original post, you’ll note how flimsy I felt the band was. Happily, the one that was included in EA Sports Active 2 (the green one) is a little sturdier. I decided to refer back to my original post for instructions on how to assemble the EA Sports resistance bands (while the EA Sports Active instructions were confusing, I can’t even find instructions in EA Sports Active 2 on how to do it!)

EA Sports doesn’t sell resistance bands unless you buy them when buying a second set of sensors. A great (and cheap) set of replacement bands from Psyclone Games is available at Amazon. Their Wii Resistance Bands come in three sizes and have pretty good reviews on Amazon. What’s unique about these versus other similar bands is that the straps are wider, giving you room to hold your Wii remote and nunchuk. At less than $10 for three bands, the price is certainly right.

For the ultimate replacement for EA Sports Resistance bands, consider these well-reviewed Bodylastics Resistance Bands with 254 pounds of resistance bands.

These are “industrial strength” resistance bands which come in varying degrees of tension, meaning that depending on how you’re feeling any given day you can adjust the amount of the weight you use each day.

With the flimsy EA Sports resistance band, they tell you to “increase the amount of the band under your feet to increase the tension, which is not the best technique, because you end up stretching the band more than it was designed to be stretched).

The nice thing about these is that you’re not limited to using them with EA Sports Active–you can use them to work out anywhere, anytime (the Bodylastics bands come with a book of ideas).

Today, I hit my halfway mark on my 9-week fitness program with EA Sports Active 2. Interestingly, the workouts are getting more intense now. When I only had to do 180 “footfires” before, now I have to do 250. Who knows what’ll happen on the ninth week–I may be “foot firing” for hours!

Have been meaning to write about one of the pretty cool features of EA Sports Active 2: the ability to work out with a friend.

I had a chance to talk with one of the product managers of NFL Training Camp for Wii a few months ago (I still haven’t written a formal review of that game, but it’s a lot along the lines of EA Sports Active 2). He told me that when they interviewed NFL players to ask them what motivated them the most, most of them gave one reply: competition.

With other Wii fitness games, sometimes I stop because the games get a little tedious. But the ability to add a second player to EA Sports Active 2 really expands how fun this game can be.

To get started with two players on EA Sports Active, you need a second set of controllers. You can get these in one of two ways: by purchasing extra controllers from EA Sports directly, or by purchasing EA Sports Active NFL Training Camp. Specifically, you will need three things: the arm band, the leg band, and the wireless USB receiver dongle that communicates with the controllers.

Once a set of controllers are associated with a given player, they remain that way (in other words, player 1 will always use one set of controllers, player 2 will always use a second set). You need to be very careful when setting up the controllers, as if you do thing in the wrong order you can confuse the system.

If you do end up finding that one or both controller are not recognized, you’ll need to reset them. Here’s how I did it:

1) Unplug all the USB receivers from the Wii and turn the Wii off. Make sure all controllers are off.

2) Plug in one USB receiver, turn the Wii on, and start up EA Sports Active 2. Open up one of the profiles.

3) Go to Help and Settings. Click “Settings” and then “Rebind Peripherals”. You’ll be walked through a simple process. First, you’ll hold down the power button on the arm band to associate it with your profile. Then, you’ll do the same with the  leg band. Make sure you turn on only one arm band and leg band.

4) Repeat steps 1 through 3, this time plugging in the other USB receiver and choosing another profile.

5) Now, each USB receiver is associated with a respective player. Plug in both receivers, and you’re good to go.

For some reason, the nine-week workout program doesn’t support with two players–that you need to do alone. But any individual workout (or custom program you put together) can be played with two. Here’s my girlfriend Lisa and me competing in a number of sports activities.

As you can see, the calculation of calories burned is different depending on the player (yes, I weigh a LOT more than she does).

The “winner” of the competition is not so much who runs faster or is stronger, but who does the  exercises most accurately and efficiently. Some of the games get downright competitive. It’s a great way for couples, friends, or family members to get a great workout together.

If there’s going to be an EA Sports Active 3, I would hope that they could figure out a way to introduce more “head to head” type competition and more interactivity. But for now, this is probably the best multi-player exercise title out there.

So, I returned home to New York yesterday from Florida. Thus endeth the string of business trips to warm, temperate climates.

Now, over the last week, I’ve been saying that I was going to start the Nutrisystem. So it became a running gag that each meal I had was going to be the “next to last meal before the diet starts”. There was that breakfast in the Holiday Inn Express in Scottsdale I told you about. And the gourmet lunch at the resort in Florida. And the burger and fries at Darryl Strawberry’s Sports Grill. You get the idea.

Well, today the diet officially begins…again (it’s been almost 2 years since the last time I tried this diet). As I mentioned, prior to my trips I totally cleared out my fridge except for the Nutrisystem shipments that came in a few weeks ago.

So today for breakfast, I had this:

For lunch, I had the “meatball parmesian sub”.

For dinner, I had the stuffed shells (also a delicious-but-small entree from their frozen collection) and I also enjoyed a coconut almond bar and crunchy nacho crisps for my “snack” and “dessert”.

A far cry from the sumptuous meals on Marie Osmond’s infomercials, eh?

Both of these are from Nutrisystem’s frozen foods, which are a standard option in the plan nowadays. The frozen foods taste much better than their non-frozen foods, but the portions are much smaller. I did supplement my meals with a banana and apples (I bought a huge bag of apples and a huge bag of oranges to prepare for the diet–with Nutrisystem, you are supposed to supplement their meals with fruits and veggies).

It was a big contrast to the all-you can eat buffets in Florida I was enjoying only a short time ago. Although after a week of pigging out, it actually feels kind of good to “reset” my body again.

I don’t plan on staying on Nutrisystem forever, and I won’t make the mistake again of forcing myself to fanatically adhere to the diet day in and day out. I did that last time, and because the habits never became part of my lifestyle, once the diet ended the old habits reverted and I regained most of the weight I’d lost.

So this time, If I’m out at a ball game or on a date or whatever, I’ll still eat “real” food. But for the rest of the time I’ll use the Nutrisystem to try to force myself to get used to eating smaller portions and lower glycemic foods.

And of course, there’s the exercise. One thing I’ve found after three weeks of EA Sports Active 2–weight loss will not come if you don’t mind BOTH diet and exercise. What I found myself doing was, the more I exercised, the more subconsciously I felt I could indulge when eating (it was so easy to justify that extra dessert knowing I’d work it off).

Speaking of EA Sports Active, I have fallen behind a bit–I couldn’t bring the Wii to Florida with me, which meant I couldn’t work out for the whole week. So today (a rest day), I made up two missed exercises, and on the next few rest days I’ll plan to make up the remainder of them. I’m up to 11 total, which still puts me behind dbqhams (with an impressive 25), holythorn, DancingLaura, and dianska…but I will catch up!! For the others in the group–chop chop!!

So, I’m writing this from 2500 miles away from home and 35,374 feet in the air. My company sent me on a business trip to Phoenix, Arizona. Believe you me, it was tough spending the week away from the 6 degrees (yes, it was 6 degrees when I left) and 19 inches of snow in New York to come to the 73 degree sunshine in Phoenix, but I manged to survive.

I haven’t started my Nutrisystem yet (I will when I get home), but I started the week trying to eat healthy. Here’s a picture of me ordering a veggie wrap at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. As far as veggie wraps go, this one was phenomenal. It had mashed sweet potatoes, avocados, onions, and I think a little potato salad. It was really tasty, I wish I had asked them for the recipe.

Now business trips are always dangerous for my waistline. I always end up eating all kinds of junk, and if I have an exercise routine going, it usually throws me way off. Not this time, I told myself. So I decided to haul my Wii with me on the trip so I could keep up on my 9-week program.

For all the talk of how Sony or Microsoft’s new game systems are going to take over the world, this is yet another point in the Wii’s favor. It’s very easy to lug around. I can’t imagine hauling a heavy appliance like the Xbox or the PS3, but with the Wii, I just threw it in a padded bag and put it in my checked bag. No fuss, no muss (TSA regulations do say you need to take it out separately, like a laptop, if you’re carrying it on).

I made a list of things I had to pack. They are:

1) The Wii
2) The power adapter
3) The video cable (you need to check with your hotel to make sure they have a TV that can accept audio-video inputs–thankfully my Holiday Inn Express did)
4) One Wii Remote
5) The EA Sports Active Resistance Band
6) The Sensor Bar

That’s it. It didn’t add too much extra weight (whatever weight it did add I just considered strength training for the trip ).

It was a snap to set up at the hotel. I stayed at my favorite Holiday Inn Express (located at 3131 Scottsdale Road in Scottsdale, AZ), and they had new LCD TV’s with audio/video connectors in the back. All I had to do was plug everything in, re-configure the Wii sensor for above the TV versus below, and I was set to go.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the Wii connected to the hotel Internet because the hotel’s Internet has a screen where you have to accept terms and conditions on a Web page before proceeding. But the Wii’s Internet Channel is designed in an annoying way where you can never get to the screen to accept the terms and conditions, so it just kicks you off. Hopefully Nintendo will fix this in an update to their Internet channel, but I’m not holding my breath. In any case, for those in the NutWiiSys Exercise Group, rest assured that I’m still plugging away! Hopefully my numbers will update as soon as I plug in when I get home.

So, for the week, I got three of my four workouts in. I put a bath towel or two on the floor to do the floor exercises. Being on the third floor, I was a little afraid that “foot fires” were going to make too much noise for the folks downstairs or send me crashing through the floor, but happily neither happened.

I was a little burned when I did my Tuesday exercise. I finished the exercise at about 10:00 PM. To my dismay, after I finished the exercise, EA Sports Active 2 told me that I hadn’t done my Tuesday exercise at all. Turns out when I finished the exercise, it was already past midnight, so my exercise counted towards Wednesday (which was normally a rest day). Maddeningly, I didn’t have any option to go back and have the exercise count towards Tuesday. Which means I’ll need to make up Tuesday later on in order for the system to know that I “finished” my 9-week program. Oh well, I guess I can spare one “free” exercise, but hopefully EA Sports will fix the very limited control you have over workouts (I actually remember it being much more flexible in Sports Active 1).

Anyway, I think overall it was a positive experience travelling with the Wii. I ended the week on a rather unhealthy note–the Holiday Inn Express breakfast buffet is truly sumptuous–today before my flight home I had bacon, an omelet, a biscuit with gravy, cranberry juice, and a banana…I figured I may as well treat myself to one last bad meal before the Nutrisystem starts as soon as I get home (I won’t have a choice, because I completely cleared out my fridge before my trip!)

UPDATE: I wrote the above from the plane and never got a chance to publish it. Right I’m now typing this from West Palm Beach, Florida. Turns out I had two days at home before they shipped me out again for business. Now before those of you in more frigid temperatures start throwing shoes at me, bear in mind that while I am technically sitting in a Club Med, the room is stiflingly hot and the air conditioning is not working. Although I gotta say, the food is good. Too good.

In any case, I’ll be flying home tomorrow and have a lot of EA Sports Active workouts to make up. And I will make them up, I promise! And I will start the Nutrisystem too. Because there are no more business trips coming up for a while.