Weight Loss with Wii Fitness Games and Nutrisystem

So, in case you’re wondering, I survived the great blizzard of ’11 with plenty of food to spare. I actually still haven’t even started on the Nutrisystem left, as I’m still clearing out all the food in my refrigerator and freezer. I’m down to a piece of chicken, two pieces of beef, and a half bag of dumplings so it’s safe to say the Nutrisystem will definitely start sometime this week. It’s kind of ironic that I probably ended up tripling my caloric intake in recent days trying to clear the fridge out so I can start my diet, but what can you do?

Last Thursday (January 13) I officially started the EA Sports Active 9-week workout plan. So far, I’ve completed three workouts.

Moving forward, I set up the plan to work out on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’ll work out nights after I get home from work. The nice thing about the workouts is that they’re as overly intense as the days when I went to the gym every day (and I even have mine set at the “hard” level), but you still do get your heart rate up and some good resistance training in. Anyway, we’ll see in 9 weeks how effective it really is.

I admit, I am really inspired by seeing the members of our online group, NutWiiSys, working out “along side” me too. So for, the group has had 9 of the 12 people invited to the group sign in. We’ve completed 39 workouts, worked out for 15 hours and 31 minutes, burned 5,415 calories, and have run a collective distance of 17.2 miles. One of the coolest things is that you can not only celebrate your milestones, you can also celebrate milestones of fellow group members (congrats to ssneed01 for passing an impressive 1000 calories tonight! ), as well as milestones of the team as a whole. Hopefully everyone will be on the board this week!

If you’re interested in joining a group and didn’t make it in time to make the first group, if I get enough interest, I can think about open a second group. May be good to have some friendly competition between the first and second groups Let me know!

For those of you who just purchased EA Sports Active 2 for Wii (and there were a lot of us!) and who missed the last post, I’ve set up a new online workout group just for readers of this blog/Facebook group. The group only accommodates 12 people, and 3 slots are taken, leaving 9 more.

If you’re interested in joining, leave a comment here (or in the last post), or e-mail me directly at steve [.at.] nutwiisystem [.dot.] com. I’ll email you the group name and password you can use. This way, as we’re starting our 2011 exercise regimens we can all keep each other on our toes!

In other news, it turns out Amazon has yet another sale on a ton of exercise and fitness games today under a sale they’re calling “New Year, New You”.

A ton of the top 10 fitness games are featured, including EA Sports Active, Walk It Out, and Active Life Explorer. Also on sale are hardware items like a riser for the Balance Board and hand weights for making you more Wii-ry in Wii workouts.

Check out the sale here.

Hi everyone. Just wanted to drop a note to say “Happy New Year!” If you’re visiting this week, chances are you’re looking for a good fitness plan for 2011. If you’re like me, you stuffed yourself during Thanksgiving, and again on Christmas, and again on New Year’s Eve, and everywhere in between.

Now it’s a new year. So the question is, is 2011 the year you finally go from making promises to yourself to actually getting results?

When I started this site a few years ago, I put myself on the “Nutwiisystem” fitness plan. That was going on the Nutrisystem diet plan, and supplementing it with exercise on the Wii. It worked–I lost about 20 points. But I never quite got to my target weight, and in the years since I fell back into bad habits and regained most of that weight back.

And so last night I went online and signed up for the Men’s Basic Nutrisystem package again. That’s right–in a week or two I’ll be starting the diet program all over again.

I also decided which fitness program I’ll be using: EA Sports Active NFL Training Camp. Based on all my reviews and research, this is the program I concluded would be the most useful for myself.

Similarly, for women (who comprise the bulk of this site’s readership), the exact equivalent program would be to purchase the women’s Nutrisystem program, which focuses on a healthy diet for women, and EA Sports Active 2.

By the way, if you’ve recently purchased EA Sports Active 2 for the Wii and would be interested in joining Nutwiisystem’s online EA group, let me know by posting a comment below and I’ll forward you an invite! But hurry–for some reason EA Sports only allows 12 people per group, so space is limited!

Anyway, over the next few months I’ll post my progress as I did a few years ago, complete with thoughts on the food and the exercise. Of course, I’ll continue to post reviews of Wii exercise games as I get them too.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and fit 2011!

Well, just a few months after getting on Twitter, I’ve caved in and got a page on Facebook.  You can visit it here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nutwiisystem/289330586187

Haven’t quite decided what I want to do with this page, but as with the Web site, the blog and the Twitter account, it’ll be another place where I share the latest Wii fitness game reviews, news, and deals.

In addition, I may occasionally be giving out some Wii fitness games out to random fans of the page. So visit and Like it today!

You might notice a fresh new look if you’re visiting the blog from http://www.nutwiisystem.com/blog. To make a long story short, I’ve always liked having the blog at this Web address, but Blogger said they would be unable to support it any more.

So I pulled basically an all-nighter last night to move every post, picture, and comment from the old Blogger platform to a shiny new WordPress installation. It was a ton of work, but I’m pretty sure I got everything. I’m actually excited about WordPress, as there’s a ton of stuff I can do now that I couldn’t before.

You may see some strange little hiccups here and there as a result of the migration. Hopefully I’ll be ironing those out as time progresses, but feed free to let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks for reading and for all the kind words you’ve all given me over these months. I look forward to many more Wii workouts with you. And there are definitely some good things coming

In case you haven’t seen it, at long last the list of Top 10 Wii Fitness games is updated. Hop on over and see who the new king of the hill is

In the coming few weeks, keep an eye out for reviews on Ubisoft’s Just Dance and Konami’s Walk It Out!

So, after months of putting it off, I finally decided to set up a Twitter account. If you’d like to follow me, just go here:

http://twitter.com/nutwiisystem

Of course, I’ll still be maintaining the ever-popular lists of Best Wii Fitness Games, Best of the Rest, and Worst Wii Fitness Games on www.nutwiisystem.com, and you’ll be sure to find the latest reviews on the blog. But I’ll also be Tweeting some great deals I come across for Wii exercise games, as well as interesting news and tidbits I come across. Enjoy!

Hi everyone. I’ve got a little favor to ask.

As we all know, Wii exercise is great but so is regular exercise. And so, I decided to sign up for the MS Bike Tour in New York City. It’ll be a 66-mile bike ride around Manhattan. I did this in 1999 and 2005, and I figured it was about time to do it again. It might interest some of you to know that this is the year I turn the big four-oh, and so it’s a way for me to prove to myself that I can still be fit with the best of them.

As part of the commitment to ride, I’ve also committed to raising money to fight MS. MS is a debilitating disease. There are those who can’t ride a bike, can’t play video games, and live their lives in pain. For those of us who can, please consider a generous donation. You can visit my donation page here.

As thanks for those who donate through this site, I’ll be giving away, to three of you whom I’ll select randomly, one of the Wii Fitness Games featured on this site. And even if you’re not selected, your contribution is 100% tax-deductible.

Thanks much, and now back to your regularly scheduled blog…

Steve

The Center for Disease Control reports the staggering figure that 66.3% of American adults are either overweight or obese. A recent study by Johns Hopkins projects that by 2030, 86% of Americans will be overweight or obese.

I’m one of those American adults. Chances are you are too.

There’s an entire industry of people selling diet books, low-fat foods, exercise videos, exercise equipment, and gym memberships. And yet, we are fatter than ever.

How did it come to this? It comes down to one thing: bad habits.

I was shocked a few weeks ago when someone posted a picture of me when I was in high school on Facebook. I was thin as a stick. But since the end of high school and continuing now for 20 years let’s just say my peanut butter has been on the chunky side. I can’t say I’ve been morbidly obese, but I’ve been a good 30 pounds over what all medical experts say I’m supposed to be.

I’ve started and stopped exercise programs and diets about twice each year for the last 20 years. Gyms didn’t work for me, because it was hard to get to one, I’d be too mentally tired at the end of the day to exercise, and they were just so danged expensive. Diets didn’t work for me, because my career kept me so busy that I didn’t have time to prepare the right meals–I’d just go out and grab whatever I could at the local fast food restaurant.

Two things happened last year. First of all, I bought my nieces and nephew a Wii. When I played it with them, I had a ton of fun with them. It was only afterwards that I noticed that my heart was pumping and I was sweating more than I would after a great workout.

Second, I kept hearing and hearing the commercials for Nutrisystem on ESPN radio, and I finally decided to look into it. As gimmicky as the commercials are, it all started to make sense. I tended to skip breakfast and sometimes I’d even skip lunch, thinking that this would help me lose weight. It never did, because my metabolism slowed to a crawl and I’m sure I would subconsciously gorge at dinner time. I don’t have time to control my own portion sizes, so why not have someone do it for me?

And so, I decided to start the “Nutwiisystem” diet and exercise regimen. In this blog, I’ll be tracing my own progress with a new regimen of diet and exercise with Nutrisystem and the Wii. In it, I’ll tell you details about both what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising. I’ll also chart my progress of weight loss, with a goal of getting to my target weight of 175.

Oh yes. There will be no pictures of my belly on this site. We all don’t need to see that.

Sit back and enjoy!