I’ve been on my latest physical activity stint since just after Christmas in 2006.  I exercised during my first big weight loss push (when I went from 419.2 pounds down to 232), but all I did during that period was walk 2 miles every day.

For the record, let me stop right here and say that for most people walking 2 miles a day is probably the best way to get exercise in and promote weight loss.  Most people seem to think that in order to lose weight you have to go to the gym or get some kind of home fitness equipment.  This is untrue.  Don’t get me wrong – a gym membership and regular routines with a personal trainer will certainly give you a much more balanced and focused workout, but if all you have the time for is a 2 mile walk every day it’s more than enough to kick start your metabolism and lose weight.

I pretty much stopped exercising for most of 2005 and 2006.  I played some lip service to it occasionally, but my workouts were not consistent at all.  Not surprisingly I put on a good deal of weight during this period and shot back up to around 289 pounds.  Recognizing that I was on the way back up at a fairly rapid pace I re-focused at the end of 2006 and started working out regularly with Yourself! Fitness.  I eventually worked my way up to a point when I was working out with Maya (the personal trainer in Y!F) an hour a day, six days a week.

Then I got cast in Gorey Stories.  I’m pretty sure anyone who has ever done a show as an adult will back me up when I say that keeping a regular workout routine while you’re doing one is a huge pain in the ass.  I didn’t stop completely, but my workouts got much less frequent.  Once you get knocked out of a good workout routine it can be a bitch to get back into it, and to date I still haven’t gotten back to a regular “six one hour day” week.

Part of the problem there is that I’m bored with Y!F.

I have right at 370 workouts with Maya logged on the XBox.  After you’ve done 100 or so you’ve unlocked all the extra goodies that she has, and really that’s just a few extra locations and some different music choices.  The exercises are all pretty well old hat to me now – at least at my fitness level.  If I was at a point where the workouts she was throwing at me were “no sweat” she’d probably throw some new stuff at me but I’m not even sure of that, really.

I’ve had some fantastic results working with Maya.  I don’t deny that.  I have muscle definition where there wasn’t any before.  My abs are in good enough shape that when I have surgery to remove my excess skin from the weight loss I won’t need to have work done on the muscles.  My legs look great, and doing a one hour workout doesn’t totally kick my ass for the rest of the day.

But yeah, I’m bored.

So yesterday I finally managed to snag a Wii Fit. As those of you who follow my Twitter feed know I’ve been trying to snag one of these things for months.  It really pisses me off that they are so hard to find because I know the reason why.  It’s not because people are buying them to use.  They are buying them to sell at double the price.  It REALLY pisses me off.  I totally lucked into the one I got.  I have the Wii Fit Tracker on my News Gator RSS feed and I got notice that Amazon had them new.  When I got to the site, though, the new stock they had was already sold out.  I was clicking around and looking at used options when I noticed the “used and new” price suddenly change from $171 to $81.  A few clicks later and I discover that Amazon has a warehouse service that they sell their “open box” product through.  The Wii Fits they had there were advertised as being fully warrantied by Amazon with damaged boxes.

The “damaged box” I got had some slight crumpling on the edges.  Really no worse than would have happened during shipping anyway.  Outside of that it was brand new.  I believe Amazon will let you pre-order these open box products, so if you’re in the market for a Wii Fit I highly reccomend you get one there.

I did my first workout yesterday.  My initial impressions?  It’s fun!  It’s nowhere near as intesnse as a workout with Maya is, but that may change as I do more workouts.  I’ve seen in other places there are “longer” routines you can open and those may get the heart rate moving more, but as of this point I’d characterize my entire workout as “low intensity” on the Weight Watchers scale.  Still, it’s a solid hour of exercise and at my weight that’s still four activity points earned.

I think that I’m going to end up doing a combination of Yourself! Fitness and Wii Fit workouts as I get into the groove of things.  I like the variety of the Wii Fit exercises and how fun some of them are, but I do feel I need to keep a more intense level of activity in my routine as well.

I also need to quit smoking again.

Which, I think, we’re going to do here…like…soon.

Again.

Whee!

And on that note, I’m going to go do some exercise.