Week 8 Coastal Point Health Tech Challenge

It’s Week 8 of the Coastal Point Health Tech Challenge, and we’ve expanded the arsenal of high-tech weapons in my own personal battle of the bulges, adding the Nintendo DS and My Weight Loss Coach software to the regimen from the first five weeks of the challenge, which focused on the Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit game.

First, a progress report: During the first six weeks of the challenge, I managed to gain 13 pounds. Yes, indeed, you read that right. I gained 13 pounds.

Now, on the plus side, my body fat percentage has dropped 2 percent since I started monitoring it, in Week 4. My clothes fit more loosely. I don’t get tired nearly as easily. I can keep up with an active near-3-year-old better than ever before.

Coastal Point Classifieds Diva Jane Johnson tells me I don’t sound the same when I tackle the stairs between the front door of the Coastal Point megaplex and my desk upstairs. This appears to be a good thing, since it involves less grumbling about needing an elevator and about my bad knees, and less wheezing when I get to the top of the stairs.

Actually, I have rarely complained about the stairs, out of pure embarrassment that they’re a task I’ve always hated to tackle. But now that that’s not the case anymore, I feel perfectly fine with admitting it.

I can get to the top of the stairs these days without much of an elevation in my heart rate and can easily talk when I get to the top, which is one of the surest signs that — despite the weight gain — the challenge is a big win so far. I’m even feeling inclined to try out some new workout options, in addition to what I’m already doing.

I am still firmly of the belief that most of those 13 pounds has been new muscle added by more than a half-hour of significant aerobic exercise done five to seven times a week, after years of virtually no exercise. I have noticed the biggest upswings on the days following particularly heavy workouts, which seems to bear out this notion.

Missing out on body-fat measurements for the first four weeks does leave me guessing on how much that is the case. But drops in those measurements since then seem to confirm it.

Also confirming the success of the program has been the subsequent two and a half weeks and their results — a loss of 6 pounds, bringing the net results of the first eight weeks of the challenge to about 7 pounds gained and a decided downward slope that seems to indicate my body has finally settled in to its new regimen and is now consistently dropping weight under the pressure of exercise, rather than just adding new muscle.

A step in the wrong direction

About the same point when that downward slide began, on June 26, I picked up a copy of My Weight Loss Coach for the Nintendo DS, adding a portable component — and a dietary element — to the Health Tech Challenge.

The “game,” with its pedometer peripheral, enables the slender portable game system to serve as a way to track — and balance — diet and exercise habits with goal of weight loss.

Where Wii Fit aims to improve your bodily fitness by improving physical conditioning, balance and agility, My Weight Loss Coach is genuinely focused on losing weight, along with improving exercise and eating habits.

One of the ways it does this is to encourage you to get more active in your daily life. You monitor your activity level by wearing the included pedometer, then plugging it into the DS on a daily basis, as part of four-part daily objective.

This, however, is one area of the program where I have to give My Fitness Coach a decided thumbs-down.

When I unpacked the game and pedometer, I followed the instructions on where to place the pedometer and how to ensure it was accurately measuring my steps. The instructions call for you to take 50 steps with the pedometer at your waist and then see if it is close to an accurate measurement.

In my case, it wasn’t. At all. I took 50 steps and it said 28. The instructions said that if it was too inaccurate, you should move it to a different location and try again. I did. I took 50 steps. It said 32. I thought it would surely recommend a recalibration via the DS after that second failure. Instead, it recommended I move the pedometer and try again. The third try netted a 26.

In the end, the best results I ended up with were achieved by placing the pedometer on my shirt, at armpit level, with 45 steps counted out of 50. This seemed like a reasonable solution, even if it should work at the waist.

However, more than a week into using My Weight Loss Coach and after struggling on several days to reach the initial 4,500-step objective set for me, I realized that the pedometer simply wasn’t working well for me. The concept, yes. The hardware, no.

Even though the software reduced my objective to 3,500 steps after a few days, I started doubling and tripling the pedometer’s step count — a number that more accurately reflected my real activity level. But the notion of an easy way to track that activity was nixed.

The hardware problem was confirmed when I dug out a $10 pedometer I’d purchased several years ago and, without even calibrating it for my particular step length, got it to read more than twice the number of steps shown on the My Weight Loss Coach pedometer during the course of a day. Neither was extremely accurate on another 50-step test, both counting less than that number, but the third-party pedometer was pretty close.

This should not have happened. The included pedometer is a bad design all around. It’s huge — more than three times the size of the small one I bought for $10 (since made even smaller). It’s also Wii white, drawing curious questions from everyone who saw me wearing it. The rubber plug that protects the connector for the DS is easily dislodged and, therefore, lost. And, well, it just doesn’t work.

Granted, it might work for someone out there. But however I walk, it isn’t compatible with an accurate reading on that particular pedometer. And there is no way to calibrate it. None.

Bottom line: buy a cheap pedometer, calibrate it and use it instead. When the DS doesn’t find the included pedometer attached for the pedometer segment of the software, it will let you add steps manually, in 100-step increments. Make life easy for yourself. Do that.

Challenges, both big and little

Outside of that failure, My Weight Loss Coach is a pretty solid success. You start off programming in your gender, height and weight. The same problem of using body mass index (BMI) as a major calculation of health exists here, as it does in Wii Fit. Use the same grains of salt, and focus on the real core of the “game”: a healthy lifestyle, and a resulting weight loss.

As I mentioned previously, the software gives you four daily objectives. You get points for reaching each objective, in the form of distance on an overall simulated walk taken by your cute little stick-figure avatar.

As you reach more objectives, you get longer distances on your total, receive rewards in the form of picture postcards from scenic locations with that distance (i.e. to the top of Mount Everest) and see some literal progress.

The four daily objectives are:

(1) Take more steps:

Initially, it asked me for 6,000 steps. When I failed to hit even 3,000 or 4,000 on the first few days (bad pedometer!), it dropped that number to 3,500. After both getting a decent pedometer and wearing it even during my workouts, I had no trouble hitting that, and the objective was boosted to 4,500. (The software says the average person takes 3,000 to 4,000 steps per day.)

(2) At least one challenge:

My Weight Loss Coach takes its name seriously, challenging you to a number of lifestyle-improving tasks on a daily basis. You can take anywhere between one and six of these challenges, most of which are to be accomplished in 24 hours, some of which are “minute challenges” and are to be done right then and there. Finish six in a day, and you get bonus mileage.

The challenges are tailored for you as a result of coaching sessions that you gradually unlock by meeting your daily challenges. Coaching topics include things ranging from your preferred types of exercise to how/when you cook, your food budget, motivational factors, how adventurous you are in the kitchen and even going “green.”

By answering a series of questions, you give the software an idea of how it can help you get a healthier lifestyle. And new challenges are the result. You can go back later to change the answers, if you feel you’re not getting the right kinds of challenges.

Challenges are also tailored by adjusting your “dossier” in the “backpack” section of the software. These questions deal with things such as whether you have children or a dog, whether you drive a car, etc. And challenges including (or excluding) these factors are controlled by the answers you give.

Challenges I have received have included: Research the benefits of a good cardiovascular system; Find a new recipe for Saturday dinner; Reduce the amount of trash you produce today to the absolute minimum (this one made me question whether I should eat the packaging); Get some (healthy!) non-perishable snacks for your car; Whenever you can, buy food items from your own region or country.

The biggest beef I’ve had with the challenges — and not much of one, really — is that they do get repetitive once you’ve seen the same one two or three times in a few weeks. How many times can I check which jar in my spice rack is the fullest?

And, despite the tailoring, sometimes you do get a few that are totally not going to work for you. “Have milk instead of cream in your coffee.” I don’t drink coffee. Do I take this one and check it off for an easy win? And if I just washed all the dishes, can I take credit for following the minute challenge to wash a few dishes?

There are some good ones, for sure. “Go for a walk with your child(ren), explore the neighborhood.” A great reminder and a benefit for the whole family. “Take 10,000 steps.” Unlikely, but a good challenge. “Take 2,000 steps more than usual.” Doable. “Ask your child(ren) to help with dinner.” Difficult to accomplish the intent, but I can ask. “Take the dog for a walk.” The neighbors would rather I didn’t, believe me. (I finally unchecked the dog question in my dossier.)

(3) 30 minutes of physical activity:

This one’s easy enough. Take a long walk. Go for a run, if you can. Do an aerobics video. Weed the garden. Do some laundry.

You can put in your activity in the “quick” method, chalking up one of three intensities: light (walking, lifting), normal (walking, lifting, half-hour to an hour of exercise) or heavy (a lot of lifting, more than an hour of exercise, a very busy day spent always moving); or you can detail what you did and for how long.

In detailed mode, you can select from house/yard-work, martial arts, workout (light activity — yoga, tai chi, weight lifting), light exercise (walking, shopping, golf), heavy exercise (aerobics, skiing, skating), aquatic exercise (swimming, waterskiing) solo sport (tennis, mountain climbing, ping pong), light team sport (baseball, curling!, volleyball) or heavy team sport (football, basketball, hockey).

Rattle off the time you spent, and it will count up the calories used, or at least an estimate thereof.

This is one somewhat unique point of My Weight Loss Coach. Rather than focusing on calories, it counts both food and activity in terms of units, represented by a little nuclear-type symbol that might reflect a calorie being burned. One unit equals 50 calories.

(4) Perfect balance between activity and food:

This portion of your objective aims to match calories needed (as recommended for you by the software) and calories eaten. The ideal here is to eat no more than what you need when the software takes account of your base metabolism and the activity you track between your pedometer and activity reports.

So, here we’re officially adding the diet portion of the Health Tech Challenge.

It’s handy that the “game” uses 50 calories of food per unit recorded. That happens to compare with the measure used by Weight Watchers on their point system. The key difference is that My Weight Loss Coach doesn’t artificially weigh exercise points as lower than calories as a way to get you to ensure you don’t overcompensate for exercise. Instead, you’re including your metabolism and your activity in an overall calculation and resulting target.

The notion is the same, however: Eat what you need to live and be healthy, not more and not too much less. If you exercise, you can eat a bit more — just so long as you don’t go over a healthy amount.

Food, again, can be recorded in My Weight Loss Coach in a detailed or quick way. Quick asks six questions per day in the format of “How much food did you eat for…” a given meal. You drag and drop a sample heavy or light meal, or empty plate, and into your avatar’s mouth goes an appropriate number of units and calories.

Detailed lets you drop in food from a series of categories: general fruits, citrus, berries, tropical fruits, green vegetables, colored vegetables, pale vegetables, seafood, poultry, meats, deli, eggs/beans/nuts, grains, breads, dairy, cheese, fast food (pizza, burgers, fries, fried chicken, hot dogs), condiments/marinades, meals (salad, sandwich, spaghetti, soup, Asian takeout, beverages, drinks, coffee and alcohol, desserts, breakfast, sweets (potato chips, pretzels, popcorn, candy), snacks (fruit, vegetables with dip, muffin, doughnut, yogurt, cookies).

As you may have noticed, some of these categories are a little odd and/or arbitrary. I expected doughnut to be listed under breakfast, not snack. And I don’t think too many people think of potato chips as “sweets,” but rather as snacks.

And don’t think for a minute that the exact meal you had at a local restaurant is going to be listed under meals. And does a salad include dressing? Where’s light sour cream on the list, or bean burritos? You’re going to be doing a lot of guessing and looking up calorie counts.

This is good in that it reminds you to check exactly how much you’re eating and what its nutritional contents are. These are life skills. And this is the main reason I prefer the detailed method to the quick one, even if you’re mostly guessing either way.

While the food balance portion of My Weight Loss Coach has confirmed my notion that my diet has been pretty good to date, I’ve found real value in being reminded at the end of the night that I might want to skip dessert and leave myself a few units under being exactly balanced, rather than a few units over.

I should also note that the software initially recommended I aim for nearly 3,900 calories a day — a number I couldn’t believe, having existed on 1,200-calorie diets in the past and being under 2,000 on average.

After two days of gaining a little weight and not even approaching this number, I updated my weight in the profile section of the software. It immediately took note of the gain and cut that number down to 2,900 and then to 2,250, recognizing that my metabolism is indeed this slow.

It now calculates that I need 2,900 just to get through the day without loss or gain, with no exercise, which is probably still too high. But that base metabolism number is the basis of the entire food/activity balance calculation, and you can expect it to take a few days or weeks, and a few updates to your weight, to figure you out. It will eventually do so.

This is one big benefit of the program over a diet with a flat calorie goal — it sees when you’re gaining weight and recommends a modest reduction, and it will adapt to your metabolism over time. It will tailor for you and guide you through the process. And you won’t starve along the way.

That, in the middle of the eighth week of my challenge and the middle of the third week with My Weight Loss Coach, is a big plus for me. Between Wii Fit and My Weight Loss Coach, I have continued to feel motivated to exercise most every day, and I have started paying even more attention to my diet.

Instead of looking at 7 pounds gained in the last seven weeks, I’m looking at the 6 pounds lost in the last three, because that’s a trend that I can see continuing. That goal is finally starting to look a lot closer, and a lot more achievable.