Floating down to Camelot

After spending most of August sitting on the couch going "ow!", I was feeling rather unfit in September, especially as I never seemed to get any free weekend days that were dry enough for super-long walks. Having seen someone (Neuromancer?) mention it on LJ, I bought the Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred DVD. It's advertised as 20 minutes a day, but is more like 25 minutes once you include the warm-up and cooldown, and it comes in three levels, encouraging you to move up a level after ten days or so, or whenever you feel ready. A lot of the moves are demonstrated in easier and hard versions, so it's adaptable that way, too.

The DVD doesn't make it clear whether you're supposed to do 30 consecutive days, or skip days. Everything else I've read about muscle-strengthening exercises stress the importance of rest days, but loads of people online had done this workout every day without ill-effect. In the end, I decided to do it every day, on the grounds that I'd find it easier to stick with a daily routine. As it turned out, I missed 6 days, because of such things as illness, visitors or being in London, so it's taken me five weeks to do 30 workouts.

I read quite a lot on the relative merits of morning and evening exercise, and the general conclusion seemed to be that both had their pros and cons, so individuals should choose a time that worked for them. For the first week, this was first thing in the morning - which certainly made me feel full of energy as I walked to work - but I was finding myself getting dizzy, so I switched to the afternoon when I moved up to the much-harder level two. I do it the instant I get home, without letting myself sit down and get distracted by anything, and it works quite well.

The effects are pretty impressive. I've not lost weight, but I think I've lost inches - although I didn't get round to measuring myself until half way through. I'm certainly stronger and fitter, though. It's amazing how quickly this happens. I was noticeably more flexible after just 4 or 5 days. The level two workout well nigh killed me first time round, and I was opting for the easy versions of several of the exercises, or just collapsing on the floor. Ten days later, I was doing the whole thing on hard. It was particularly encouraging when Pellinor joined in at the weekends. He was better than me the first weekend, but by the third weekend, he was collapsing in an exhausted little heap while I carried on undaunted.

I've already bought several more of her workout DVDs, to get something to move on to. They all arrived on Monday, when I had the day off work, and I rather foolishly tried them all, "just to see what they were like." This was unwise, since I could hardly move on Tuesday or yesterday, but at least it proved that I'm capable of doing them. That certainly wouldn't have been true a month ago.

Well, that was unexpected. I weighed myself today, and I'm the same weight I was at the start of October. I lost quite a bit of weight between January and May last year, but my resolve for the rest of the year was to stay the same overall, although with short-term fluctuations caused by holidays etc. However, I haven't weighed myself since early October, I was definitely getting less abstemious during October and November, and I was positively over-indulgent during December. I was fully expecting to have put on 4 or 5 pounds, but somehow I haven't. How odd. Maybe all those Doritos, dips, chocolate bars and jugs of homemade wine that I consumed between Christmas and New Year were special magic ones, with no calories in them.

I decided to take a break from sewing and renew my acquaintance with Wii Fit. (It was sarcastic at me. "It's been 153 days since your last session," it said. "Don't worry, I haven't forgotten your name. Hello, Precious." (And, yes, my cats do have Wii Fit profiles. I'm sorry!))

Anyway, it struck me once again how strange are some of the things the "trainer" says. "As you do this exercise," he says, "imagine your upper and lower body separating." Um... No, thank you. I'd rather not. At various other points, he tells me to "imagine my ideal body" while exercising. I'm afraid I don't really have a clear image of what an ideal body would look like (and if I did, it would probably be male and clad in a baggy white shirt and swashbuckling trousers), so I like to imagine that I'm a maritime explorer, and I imagine a lovely placid body of water, or else that I'm a detective, facing a nice neat dead body with "The Butler did it" taped to its brow.

Grr! Every time I do Wii Fit, I end up snarling. Now, I know that there are far more worthy ways to get fit than to use Wii Fit, but the concept suits me well. I can do it inside - good on this rainy days - and I can do it in a short burst while dinner is cooking. Since I'm a person who will do absolutely anything to earn five shiny gold stars, that aspect of it all is good for me, too. (Or somewhat good for me, anyway, in that I will work obsessively on an exercise until I get five stars, and then lose interest in it completely until Pellinor kicks me off the top of the high score table, in which I suddenly feel the urge to exercise in that way again.)

However, although much of it is good, it is also so very annoying. It talks to me all the time. Now, I am an impatient person when it comes to computer games. I'm the sort of person who likes to skip cut scenes and get on with the killing. I therefore find it very annoying when I want to do a 1 minute yoga exercise, and first have to sit through my "trainer" waffling on about how he was up late last night and giving me an unasked-for tip about sleep patterns, and then, when I've finished, to sit through a lengthy speech which is exactly the same as it was the previous 67 times I did this exercise. To clock 30 minutes of exercise, you have to play the thing for nearly an hour. (Although Wii Fit Plus does improve on this, since you can string together exercises into a routine, which is free from waffle.)

I also get very annoyed when it tells me off. Weight can fluctuate by several pounds a day, depending on what you've recently eaten, or even on what you ate yesterday, since some foods cause your body to cling onto fluids, which can temporarily boost your weight by a pound or two. If your weight is one pound heavier than it was the day before, it does not mean that you have "put on one pound," yet the horrid machine shouts at you and interrogates you about your awful habits that might have caused this weight gain.

In fact, it seems to tell you off no matter what you do. I was once told off for missing a day of exercise, and then immediately told off for exercising too hard and not taking a break. I did a half hour exercise routine in which every single exercise earned me comments about how wonderful I was, only for the final comment to be something along the lines of "that was pathetic. Unless your posture is great you can't be beautiful."

I got told off by Wii Fit today... for being too successful. When we got Wii Fit in mid-January (when I'd already lost 4 pounds since the start of the year) I set a target of 20 pounds in 3 months. With three weeks to go, it sternly and disapprovingly told me that I still had 9 pounds to go, so was clearly going to fail miserably at my target, miserable layabout that I was, so I should set a new one. I then set a modest target of 5 pounds in a month, which I managed to achieve today, after only three weeks. I'd hoped for a fanfare and streamers. I had at least expected some congratulations. Instead, it pursed its metaphorical lips, sniffed, and told me that I shouldn't focus on short term goals and rapid weight loss, and that I'd probably ruined my health forever and doomed myself to an early grave by following faddy diets. (Okay, I'm reading between the lines here, but the gist of it was there.)

I haven't yet found a single thing that doesn't make it look disapprovingly at me. Exercise in the evening, and it sternly asks you if you've had dinner yet, clearly suspecting that you're going to Eat Too Late. (It really doesn't like Eating Too Late.) Miss a day, and it pointedly asks if you've been away, clearly imagining you partying and stuffing yourself on doughnuts in a house of sin. It even lectured me at length about the perils of having my centre of balance off-centre just after it had (grudgingly) told me that I had perfect balance. I've only got a couple of pounds to go before it will judge me to be no longer overweight, so I'm wondering what it will find to criticise me about on the day that this happens.

As anthropomorphised lumps of plastic go, it really is a very annoying one.

We bought Wii Fit on Friday, on the grounds that the only way I am likely to be persuaded to exercise regularly is to tie it in with high score tables, unlockables and star ratings. If success can be measured by the fact that all my muscles are so stiff I can hardly move today, then it's a success.

The funniest thing is that it populates its world with all our other Miis, which means that I can be jogging along through a park, and suddenly my parents race past me, waving. skordh seems particularly fond of standing on stage doing a vaguely dance-like stepping routine, in front of a rapturous audience of people I don't know, who were probably created by G. in her mad Mii-creating frenzy. jane_somebody and phina_v like throwing hula hoops for me to catch with my body, some of which clout me on the head with a painful-sounding boinging noise. prince_eldarion likes to throw pandas and boots at me when I'm trying to head off footballs, while king_pellinor stands and watches, shaking his head sternly. and Person-who-would-be-Bethran just appears as a disembodied head on a marble, for me to carefully tilt into a hole.