So, you tried the Grapefruit diet and decided you needed a bit more variety in your life. Or maybe you thought the cabbage soup diet was pretty keen but you were tired of passing gas all the time. Perhaps you got sick of bacon and cheese and broke down after three months on the Atkins diet.
No worries, my friends, we have a new diet for you.
The Twinkie diet.
I’m totally serious here.
On Friday, November 5th, 2010, Weight Watchers made a pretty major announcement.
They are changing the POINTS system.They haven’t given out any details yet, but if the video below is any indicator this isn’t like the changes we’ve seen in the past where they have given you options other than POINTS to track your food intake (options such as Core or Filling foods). No, from the sound of it they are going to fundamentally change the way POINTS are calculated.
This scares the crap out of me.
January 21st, 2011, will mark my 10 year anniversary on Weight Watchers. While I have not yet hit my ultimate goal weight, I have managed to lose and keep off approximately 170 pounds. I know the POINTS system like the back of my hand, and I can tell you the POINTS values of many foods without having to look them up. Now? All of that may change. I’m going to have to re-learn the program all over again.
EASPORTS really has cranked up the PR machine in anticipation of the November 16th release of EASPORTS Active 2. In the last few months they have announced that David Beckham and Venus Williams will be celebrity spokespeople for the product, and they have also been releasing a steady stream of promotional videos to drive player interest. The latest video, released last night on Facebook, reveals an impressive array of interesting and, perhaps more importantly, challenging looking exercises.
Buried deep within the comments on one of my recent articles over at WoW.com was an interesting little bit of information from a poster named Saitenyo. She talked about how she set up a platform near a recumbent bike in her home so that she could use her laptop to play World of Warcraft while exercising. I was curious to learn more about this, because while we’ve talked about getting in exercise while playing an MMORPG like WoW, in all my years of gaming I’ve never really known anyone that has put a serious effort into doing so.
A brief exchange of emails later, and I had the full story from the player behind the avatar, one Chelsea Brown. Ms. Brown is a recent BFA graduate from the Laguna College of Art and Design and a self-proclaimed fan of a long list of things that would make her a perfect candidate for attendance at Dragon*Con. She did such a great job of explaining her set up and the benefits that she got from it that I figured I’d go ahead and let her do so in her own words.
While the First Lady of the United States of America has no official title or responsibilities, it has become tradition for the women in this arguably influential role to associate themselves with a humanitarian cause during their husbands administration. In the past few decades we have seen examples of this in Laura Bush’s efforts in support of womens’ rights and childhood literacy, Hillary Clinton’s push for Health Care reform, and (perhaps most famously) Nancy Reagan and her Just Say No anti-drug campaign. First Lady Michelle Obama is no exception to this tradition, and she’s taken up the fight against what many feel is an increasingly dangerous threat to our overall health as a nation – childhood obesity.
According to statistics from the Center for Disease Control, the number of children who are overweight to the point of obesity has increased dramatically since 1980. The percentage of children aged 12 to 19 who fell into this extremely unhealthy weight range (generally considered to be 50 pounds or more overweight) increased from 5% to a stunning 17.6% in 2006, more than tripling the 1980 numbers. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that nearly 80% of children who are obese between the ages of 10 and 15 continue to hold that unhappy distinction into adulthood. With obesity being linked to serious life threatening diseases such as Type II Diabetes and Heart Disease, it is clear that this trend is not only bad for our well-being as a nation but that it is also puts a strain on our already financially strapped health care system.
EA SPORTS is at it again. Last year they released the highly acclaimed EA SPORTS Active, and interactive fitness game for the Nintendo Wii that used the various motion detection equipment available for the platform to offer a wide array of physically challenging workouts in a convenient 30 day program. In the same year they came out with EA SPORTS Active More Workouts, expanding the already excellent game with a broader focus on core exercises and “leveling up” the challenge to last for six weeks. The franchise seems to be working out very well for EA SPORTS (no pun intended), so much so that they even expanded their advertising push to include the Sports Authority fitness equipment chain.
On Tuesday, EA SPORTS announced that they are expanding the line yet again. EA SPORTS Active 2.0 (working title) is currently in production at the Vancouver headquarters of EA Canada.
In what can only be seen as complete universal injustice, we here at ShrinkGeek have to hold down regular old nine-to-five jobs in order to put our healthy food on the table. Fortunately, the job that I’ve got is a pretty decent one – especially when you factor in the benefits. In particular, the employee gym we have in our corporate headquarters is pretty nice. I’m down there at least once a day, and it has helped me considerably in my efforts to refocus on my weight loss in the last year.
One thing we do not have, however, is a cafeteria. We’re a decent-sized company, but we don’t really have enough staff in our main location to justify that kind of expense. The only access we have to food comes in the form of vending machines, and as someone who traditionally doesn’t carry cash, that has never been a viable option for me… up until last week, anyway. We recently switched vendors, and now all of the food dispensary units in our break room take debit cards.
Unfortunately, many of the options in those machines can’t really be slotted into the “healthy choices” category. In fact, some of the ones that seem obvious choices in that arena are far from it.
January 1st is, traditionally, a day that many people use as the motivation to make positive changes in their lives. From getting in shape to going to church more often and everything in between there are countless ways in which many people are vowing to improve themselves, starting today. If you’ve made a resolution to improve yourself but you’re not quite sure how to go about doing so, you may find value in taking on some kind of challenge to help you reach your goals. We’ve collected a list of 10 of our favorite ones for you to check out below the cut.
There was a lot of buzz on the floor of E3 this year after Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, and rightly so. The potential to have a game system that can track your movements so precisely that it can actually recognize who you are when you walk into the room is pretty amazing (and, admittedly, pretty creepy at the same time). While attaching a camera to a console to use in a video game is nothing new, the level of interactivity that Project Natal is promising is going to be a huge leap forward if it ever actually makes it out of development. Needless to say, this kind of tool could totally revolutionize the fitness gaming industry.
Ubisoft, however, isn’t waiting around for Microsoft to finish development of Project Natal. This Christmas they are bringing the hands-free fitness gaming concept to the Nintendo Wii.
Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel
Health care is big business. Just ask President Obama. Even with our twenty-four hour news cycle being overrun with updates about the Iranian Elections or the latest round of tragic celebrity deaths, there is still almost daily coverage of the debate in Washington about the future of health care in America. While there is a great deal of conflict over what exactly the cure is for our ailing health care system, it seems as though everyone agrees that something needs to be done to reign in the rate at which health care spending continues to grow. If nothing changes the current estimates indicate that by 2017 health care expenses will top nearly $4.7 trillion dollars (nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product).
With all of that money floating around in the health care system it should not come as much of a shocker to learn that in the last 18 months exergames have generated nearly $2 Billion dollars in worldwide sales. Despite our ever-expanding waist lines (or perhaps as a direct result of them) video game fans are flocking to fitness related video games like Wii Fit and EA SPORTS Active.