Wii Fit fit for two year olds, and other revelations
by Scott Jon Siegel 
{ May 30th 2008 at 1:00AM }
What has he learned? For one, the latest year of birth possible in Wii Fit is 2006, and the shortest height is an astounding one foot, eight inches. This means that a two-year-old can actually play Wii Fit which is, if nothing else, creepy.
Also, Fletcher's bagless vacuum cleaner is sadly underweight, with a body mass index of 7.11. His cat, on the other hand, could stand to lose a few pounds (BMI of 21.5!), and has very poor balance. Check out the post for a few more fun experiments, such as how Wii Fit performs on Wii Fit. The mind boggles.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fernando Rocker @ May 30th 2008 1:12AM
Bozon, from IGN, lost 10 lbs. with WiiFit, in one week.
http://blogs.ign.com/WiiGetFit/2008/05/27/91198/
ComradeTrotskii @ May 30th 2008 1:24AM
I'm not going to read that pseudo-science crap but 10 pounds is 35,000 kcals (Calories). If he burned off 10 pounds playing Wii Fit in one week he would likely be dead.
Also kids: losing 10 pounds in one week is NOT HEALTHY
Grog @ May 30th 2008 1:39AM
I just read through it. For one thing, it was 9 days. For another, it's not like he's just doing WiiFit: he's using it as a motivator and "fitness base" for everything else he's doing. He's also doing cardio exercise (like an elliptical for 45 minutes one day) and eating what appears to be a very healthy diet.
The recommended weight loss goal for most individuals is .5-1 pound per week. This is certainly a lot more than that. At the same time, he appears to be taking care of his dietary needs OK (i.e. not starving himself) and he has a bit more extra weight than most to get rid of.
Good for him for getting serious about a healthy lifestyle.
JerJerBinks @ May 30th 2008 1:52AM
When your BMI is 38, any exercise will make massive improvements. Anyway, I wouldn't tout this as a success story yet. Give him a year and then we will see how much of a impact Wiifit has made on his health.
chez @ May 30th 2008 2:27AM
I lost 14 pounds in 7 days a while back. Wasn't fun let me tell you! Had to put on some serious weight and start exercising much more from that. Docs didn't seem bothered by it though.
mocax @ May 30th 2008 8:51AM
I believe 8 pounds of what he lost was beer.
ComradeTrotskii @ May 30th 2008 1:18AM
Y'know there was that story a while back about the ten year old British girl who was labelled by Wii Fit as being 'obese'.
Those pictures in the gallery also list some suspect BMI classifications.
http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/photos/wii-fit-measures-stuff/831365/
A BMI of 21.5 (which cannot be applied in any way to cat) is not 'obese' but is at the low end of normal.
The Wii Fit box with a BMI of 17.69 is classified as 'normal'. 17.69 is underweight in BMI classification.
Either those are wrong, or Wii Fit is wrong.
...Jan... @ May 30th 2008 1:30AM
I think that's because they take age into consideration. Like, my grandma is only a little smaller than me, but she was classified as underweight while me normal.
2 year olds shouldn't be playing this. Now midgets...well...I'm sure they make up part of the Wii's demographic.
ComradeTrotskii @ May 30th 2008 1:43AM
That's a good point. Age isn't normally taken into consideration as far as BMI calculations are concerned (as I'm sure everyone is aware it is not the most useful of measurements other than a very general indication).
If only I could a hold of a copy of Wii Fit to judge all this stuff first hand.
*Edit to my previous post:
Either those are wrong, or Wii Fit is wrong. Or I didn't consider everything before typing the first thing that came to my head.
Keroro @ May 30th 2008 1:41AM
OH NO, SOMEBODY CALL THE WAAAAMBULANCE, THINGS MIGHT GET MESSY!!!
mike @ May 30th 2008 1:22AM
Pehaps you joystiq bloggers could be a little less greedy and have the ds fanboy bloggers paid a little more. This poor man is running his wii fit on a minium wage "tube" tv :(
JerJerBinks @ May 30th 2008 1:55AM
Uh, yeah, Get that man a HD TV for his ... Wi..
No, I take that back. He is playing the Wii the way it is meant to be played.
chez @ May 30th 2008 2:31AM
Do tube TV's even support progressive scan? They sure don't have them in the UK...
If we're pissing around with this let me throw out Halo 3 "barely higher than SD" and the PS3's very own standard def GTA IV... Just to cover both bases like.
el serpiente @ May 30th 2008 3:24AM
I'm gonna call you "low-res chez" from now on, in honor of your gimped console.
deaftly @ May 30th 2008 8:02AM
hahaha that was absolutely hilarious el serpiss, brilliant!
/sarcasm
el serpiente @ May 30th 2008 10:41AM
I was going for mildly amusing, but hey.
rTwelve [xbl:chilblane] @ May 30th 2008 1:30AM
"such as how Wii Fit performs on Wii Fit."
MIND = BLOWN
Banton Nasty @ May 30th 2008 2:13AM
Real men justified convincing to all plights and I of plight believed unaware, unconcerned, unjaded and unconscious, ill-mannered and unwilling to ignore any justification unreal or not. Wanting not and purposeless such beckoning pulled desires unfulfilled while unknown to full frontal captivity. Eyelashes swindled in front photographically calling then lingering riptides washed away our realms into forgotten pasts. Irrelevancies became relevant. Non words regained meaning once again since never. Blossoming in our minds, white tasteless acquaintances dissolved into ash. Once more and once again the static recollections ceased their grip to our realities. Both ceaseless and unaware.
marcusherrick @ Jun 4th 2008 10:23AM
That's Wii-Tarded
Mr. Picklesworth @ May 30th 2008 2:16AM
Wii Fit has an arbitrary maximum limit for date of birth? Damnit, why?!
...Short-sighted oafs. This feels like how my DS now adjusts for daylight savings time incorrectly, and there is no chance of that being solved because Nintendo and software updates (much less /firmware updates/) do not go together.
Given the number of timeless games they have put out, one would expect Nintendo to understand, at this point, the value of not arbitrarily constraining their software to a particular set of arbitrary rules. Especially when it is something as simple as "choose a date preceding the current system date" vs. "choose any date from this list of 1900 to 2006".
Grr...
playwhutyalike @ May 30th 2008 8:34AM
Too bad 1 year olds, you can't work out on Wii-fit, so you are going to have to lose those disgusting pounds another way fatty, fat, fucking fattys.
rodrigo es chingon @ May 30th 2008 10:20AM
i wonder how many lbs. dat vacuum is gonna lose. anyways some plz tell me wats so good bout dis so i can go and buy another wii
ZeroCorpse @ May 30th 2008 1:15PM
B.M.I. is utter bullshit, anyway. It was developed in the early 17th century by a Belgian mathematician! It's outdated and frequently inaccurate.
It doesn't take muscle or bone mass into consideration, and it's not based on modern biological science. It's based on a simple math equation, and it was most a proof of concept for Quetelet's computations.
For some people, their bone and muscle mass throw off the B.M.I. wildly-- For example, athletes like Lance Armstrong have weighed-in as "overweight" when in prime condition with low (or no) body fat percentages.
An average person who just happens to have a broader skeleton will come up as being overweight for their height if they're under 6' tall. The B.M.I. doesn't take into consideration a person's loss of height when aging, either, thus starting to become nonsensical when a person reaches their 60s.
Anybody with more muscular development than average (weightlifters, athletes, people who visit the gym weekly) will come up as overweight, despite not having any fat to speak of.
How about this:
"In an analysis of 40 studies involving 250,000 people, heart patients with normal BMIs were at higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease than people whose BMIs put them in the "overweight" range (BMI 25-29.9)."
The B.M.I. is a primitive calculation, and it's sad that Nintendo chose to go with this rather than something like a Body Volume Index measurement, or a Body Fat Percentage calculation. B.M.I. will lead the game to think a perfectly healthy, broad-shouldered or fit person is actually "overweight" and this will lead to a lot of people being woefully confused-- or worse, they might just keep trying to get into the B.M.I.'s "normal" range, which would actually be extremely underweight for their body.
The whole of medicine needs to stop using this ancient math theory, and start using the more modern methods of measuring a person's health.
TrojanGuy @ May 30th 2008 2:39PM
This is hilarious.
UltimateQ @ May 30th 2008 8:56PM
I totally have that vacuum.