My hetero lifemate and I tried out our new WiiFit last night. I was stoked to play WiiSki and WiiYoga (though I cannot for the life of me imagine how WiiYoga works). However, before WiiFit would allow me to play any games or even work out, it had a few questions for me. It wanted to know my height and date of birth, which I innocently and honestly entered (you don't want to lie to these new video game consoles -- they're smarter than we are). Once my WiiFit had these two pieces of fairly innocuous, emotionally uninvolved data it proceeded weigh me, yes weigh me. Weigh me against my will. There was no way I could see to get around this step and just start playing the games.
(Note: I am kind of a spaz about being weighed. I don't like it. I've played the numbers game in very unhealthy ways before and I am not into it anymore. I find it's best if I just avoid the scale altogether.)
My S.O. and I tried to trick the WiiFit. We tried to have him lift me partially, to make it look like I weighed 45 pounds. We tried to have him just lean on the WiiFit with his hands, but WiiFit was having none of it. It kept saying, "I can't find you..." In retrospect we should have had him lean ON me with an unknown amount of weight to make me look heavy. That would have been fine. Or I could have held a giant stack of textbooks -- we have plenty of those in our house.
But we were impatient to WiiSki at this point, so I decided to just close my eyes and have S.O. page through the screens until the weighing process was all done and hopefully I'd never know.
Unfortunately I opened my eyes to soon. WiiFit had calculated my BMI as 24.1. Great! Within "normal." Healthy, right? But this was not good enough for WiiFit. WiiFit felt my BMI should be 22. It tried to tell me that a good weight for me would be 132 pounds. I tried to tell WiiFit that I practiced healthy eating and exercise habits and body-positive self-talk, but there was no button for that on the Wii. No, WiiFit demanded to know how much weight I was going to commit to lose. I told it 0.4 pounds, just to make it shut up and let me WiiSki. WiiFit wanted to know how soon I would lose those 0.4 pounds. I told it I'd do it in a month, just to make it shut up and let me frickin WiiSki already.
So what happens if I don't lose 0.4 pounds in a month? Will WiiFit berate me? Will it call me a big fat American pig? Will it freeze my accounts so I can't buy any more food? Wii is connected to the Internet, you know.
The only solution is to log in as a new Wii character, or Mii, and tell it that I am 7 feet tall and 100 years old. This way Wii will not only beg me to eat, but it will hopefully congratulate me for simply being alive.
