My Video Game Says I'm Fat

So for our anniversary in October, I bought Nisha Wii Fit. Yes, she really wanted this. No, it wasn't a veiled suggestion. If anyone could benefit from several hours of Wii Fit, its this dashing (portly) dad-to-be.

Wii Fit is a game/activity for the Nintendo Wii video game system that purportedly gets pasty little chubby kids off the couch and doing something that sort of resembles exercise. The neat thing about Wii Fit is the "balance board" peripheral it comes with. It's basically plastic rectangle about 12" x 24" in size that sits on 4 corner posts, which I believe to be simple load cells (a sensor that measures force and converts to an electric signal). In addition to summing the loads measured by each sensor to measure one's weight, the board takes the differing signals from each corner post/load cell and applies some sort of processing wizardry to yield a resultant calculation of where it thinks your center of gravity is. You interact in all sorts of games/activities by leaning in different directions on the board, jumping, etc. Its really pretty slick.

When you first fire up the game, you assign your "Mii" (the cute little avatar you create for yourself on the Wii) to a Wii Fit profile. It asks for your height and takes weight measurements to calculate your BMI. The game uses this calculated BMI to alter the appearance of your "Mii"; the higher your BMI, the more spherical your Mii character gets. Every subsequent time you play, you weigh in and it updates and tracks your weight/BMI and alters the appearance of your Mii accordingly.

Anyway, as our anniversary is in early October, Nisha thought it would be fun to use the game's ability to track your weight/BMI to track her weight during pregnancy. Nisha, being her gorgeous slender self, first weighed in 6 months pregnant and her BMI was in the middle of the "Normal" range. Bravo. Her "Mii" character didn't really change from its initial state. Not the case for poor Justin. After Nisha had weighed in, I hopped on the "balance board" (which let out a whimper as I stepped on) and was promptly declared "Obese". Nice. My Mii character now closely resembles a basketball wearing a red shirt. Self-confidence: destroyed.

As the weeks ticked by, the game observed Nisha's weight/BMI increasing and asked her why she thought it was going up. It gives you 8-10 choices like "I ate too much" or "Not enough exercise". I thought this was funny. A video game making the user explain the reason behind their failure. People pay for this privilege. Well, Nisha was finally declared "Overweight" this week with a BMI of a whopping 25.2. It will be neat to see the difference once the baby is born. She'll be congratulated in being "Normal" once again, while I'll continue being lambasted as being "Obese".

Anyway, Nisha's doing great and we're rapidly approaching baby-day. I just hope she can make it through Saturday night as we've got prime tickets to watch "A Prairie Home Companion" live at Cincinnati's Music Hall! I'm really excited to see the show, but I don't think many of them sandal-wearin' Subaru-drivin' tofu-eatin' whine-a-lots that typically attend NPR shows in person will be of much assistance if she goes into labor. I'm not a huge proponent of h(ippie)olistic medicine. :)

Justin