We bought a Wii last night, and I've been pretty much enamored with it ever since.  Of course, I bought the Wii Fit Plus with the balance board, as a main goal of the purchase was to get my rear in gear as far as exercising goes.  I've had 3 back surgeries in the past 10 years, and my last bout of physical therapy included a lot of work with a balance board.  My therapist said that the very act of balancing helps strengthen the otherwise difficult to work back muscles.  The Wii seemed like a good solution for me to help strengthen my back and increase my general activity level.

The game came with Wii Sports, and we also purchased Wii Sports Resort.  We have played through most of the mini-games in both packages, and I have to say they are really fun.  My favorite so far is probably table tennis, and I was quite surprised by how well I did with basketball.  The great thing is that while you are having all sorts of fun with these games, I believe you are also getting a decent workout.  I could definitely feel the muscles in my arms protesting.

After a short break and some lunch, I whipped out my Wii Fit Plus.  It was quite distressing to see my little persona get alarmingly fat after the body test.  This basically measures your weight, and you input your height and age, then it calculates your BMI.  I don't take much stock in the BMI measurement, and even the manual tells you not to distress if you're muscular and the BMI indicates you're fat.  Of course, I am fat and hardly muscular, so the fat little bobblehead representation of myself is unfortunately fairly accurate.

The initial balance tests indicated that my balance pretty much stinks.  I lean to the left and back and its a major effort for me to not do it.  I have some nerve damage in my right leg from my initial back surgery (my sciatic nerve was damaged pretty badly before the surgery and I never recovered all of the feeling in that leg), which causes that leg some discomfort.  I'm sure that is why I lean to the left, even though I don't think I have any major strength issues with the leg. 

I went though all of the balance games at least once just to see how I fared.  About the only one I did well on was the one where you sit still for as long as possible.  I'm a real pro at sitting still!  The most difficult were the skiing and snow boarding games.  It was a little frustrating just how bad I was, but I look forward to improving.

I did a few of the aerobic exercises.  Let me just say that I'm thankful that Better Half was napping during the hula hoop game, because I'm sure I looked utterly ridiculous, but I did manage to at least get 2 stars!  The basic step routine was fairly easy for me to do, and I could definitely feel the hips getting a workout there.  The game I fared best on was the rhythmic marching game.  This brought back fond memories of my high school marching band experience.  It was the only game where I managed to unlock the advanced level.  I was always good at marching.

The Wii Fit program reported that I burned approximately 160 calories today.  I figure that combined with the sports games gave me more exercise than I've had in a long while.  All while having a relatively good time!

It will be interesting to see how this improves my diet success and blood sugar numbers.