Maya, I can't breathe!

After New Year's rolled around, some ominous numbers coming from my bathroom scale told me it might be time to lose some weight. I agreed with those numbers that I didn't want to see them around anymore, but I was faced with the problem that I just don't like to exercise simply for the sake of exercise. I have a stationary bike, but it is employed more frequently as a place to dry towels than as an tool for calorie burning. Now, I don't mind exercise if it's incidental to doing something else, like playing sports or just walking long distances to get somewhere. I try to park as far away from places I'm going in order to get in that little bit of exercise. I might even be employing that strategy right now if not for the fact that the wind chill is currently ten below and I don't even want to go outside. So I decided to try something different.

After reading this article called Gaming your way into better shape
over on Ars Technica, I decided to buy this "game" called Yourself! Fitness. Please hold your derision until I explain.

See, if I don't ride my bike everyday, I'm the only one who knows, and the aforementioned ominous numbers have been telling me that I'm not good at holding myself accountable. The same would go with an exercise DVD. I can sweat to the Oldies, or I can leave it on the shelf, and Richard Simmons will never know.

I'm sorry, I just had a horrible flashback to eighth grade gym class. Give me a moment.

Okay, I'm back. My point is, although using my Xbox as a tool to lose weight sounds dumb, Y!F offers some nice features. First, it keeps track of progress and gradually increases the workout difficulty, which is a far sight better than me saying, "I think that's enough exercise for today. Time for a nap." Secondly, because it uses the system's internal clock, it will know if I skip the workout, and Maya (the virtual trainer) will yell at me. Again, it may sound silly, but even having a video game character hold me accountable is better than nothing.

So the game finally came today. I ordered it from Amazon, but apparently it's currently out of print, so they had to super-reserve double-back-order it from some Target store somewhere in the Midwest, I think. At any rate, I got it today. Understand then when I fired up the Xbox to try this thing out, I knew I wasn't in the best of shape. I mean, that's why I bought it in the first place. I thought after I went through the fitness profile to set it up, I'd run through a fifteen minute workout just to test it out and get started on getting fit. Sadly, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Oh, I'll just be honest: I could barely get through the setup. I had to do jumping jacks in time with this little 3D model for two minutes and I couldn't keep up. I was humiliated. I had to tell Maya to call off her dogs and go to the next part of the setup. I didn't do very well there either. To her credit, Maya didn't may fun of me out loud, but deep down I know what she's thinking.

So, out of breath just from setting up the game, I skipped past the part where it would give me recipes for healthy eating because I already have a cookbook for that, and set up a three-day-a-week exercise schedule. Then I went to the actual exercise part and saw there was an option called "Meditative Garden". I thought that sounded relaxing, so I went there. I was just starting to catch my breath when Maya came back to order me into all sorts of yoga positions, many of them involving dogs of some kind. The problem was that I had no idea what she was talking about and could not both watch her to see how it was done and actually stay in the Backwards Lotus Floating Dog Leg or whatever it was called. So I quit that and went to the actual exercise routine, which I couldn't finish either. Maya let me quit, but she says she expects to see me again on Wednesday. She seems to enjoy my suffering.