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Losing weight the Wii Way!

January 20th, 2007

I guess I’ve had a couple days of reading too much “news” instead of being self-absorbed with my own workouts.
But check this random tidbit out…. Man loses 9lbs after six weeks of playing his nintendo Wii 30mins per day… every day.

If you aren’t already familiar with the Wii, where have you been?! The big feature that differentiates it from other video games is that the controllers are wireless and you “control” most games by waving the controller around in the air. The motion sensors in the controllers detect the movement and translate them into movement of the characters on the screen. This makes for very realist sports game play, and apparently a great opportunity for a cardio vascular workout.

According to Mickey DeLorenzo, 25, of Philadelphia, he got the idea after he and his fiance were playing the Wii Boxing game and realized they were both getting a pretty good cardio workout. So he set up the idea of an experiment. He details all of this on his blog here and here. 

I haven’t read through all of his blog yet, because it is actually pretty detailed. From the looks of it, Mickey was pretty serious about setting up his experiment, and trying to keep his diet and other activity the same, only adding the Wii workout to his routine.  He used a “BioTrainer” to measure the calories used during each “workout”.

Now I’ll admit that the BioTrainer may be a little gratuitous. As I’ve discussed in my other posts, it seems to me that most calorie calculators seem dubious. But losing 9lbs in 6 weeks is certainly an interesting result. Also from the looks of his before and after photos, he started out as a relatively fit 25 year old male, and so it wasn’t like he had a lot of excess weight that was easy to lose.

Anyway, this certainly beats indoor cycling for 85hours!

Entry Filed under: Fitness, Diet, Weightloss, blogging, Video Games, Nintendo Wii