In addition to my very short exercise attention span, one of the issues I face in getting into shape is food. I don’t cook. I can, but I don’t. It’s just one of those things. That means I eat out a lot, and that I have a steady supply of frozen dinners. These things do not exactly have eating right built into the framework, even if I stick to Lean Cuisine (which are actually pretty good as far as frozen food goes).

I’ve tried a diet site in the past, but since the lowest they went for eating out was “frequently” not “all the time”, the suggested meal plans still included quite a few make at home dishes. I tried it for a while, bought the groceries and everything, and think I lasted about a week before I was trying to figure out replacements. Which, when you have no idea what criteria should be used to replace items, kinda defeats the purpose. I pretty much gave up at that point.

But a friend pointed me to myfitnesspal, which is designed for tracking calories and has convenient iPhone and iPad apps. I am having a surprising amount of fun tracking that, and their database seems to have just about everything in existence (one of the benefits of offering it for free, I suppose, as people will be inclined to add to it). I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks, but so far I’m having some slow but steady progress, which is a nice change.

In addition to tracking food, though, it lets you track exercise. Since that adds into the daily goals, I’ve been more inclined to actually do it That meant breaking out UFC Personal Trainer again, at first. I’m 20 days into my second attempt at the 100 days in a row achievement. Hopefully no weirdness will ensue this time. (I still don’t know if I didn’t get it last time by missing a day, or it the track record got wiped when the rest of my personal data reset.)

After a couple of days of just that, I decided I wanted to play Rise of Nightmares through again on a higher difficulty, but it’s not a fitness game so it doesn’t track calories. Which means toy number two is a heart rate monitor. It tracks heart rate and calories burned. I think mine skews a little high, but since I can’t think of any other way to quantify exercise gained by killing zombies, I’m running with it

Keeping with the zombies theme, my third toy is a new app called Zombies, Run! I am actually considering using it by running, if I can find somewhere I’d feel okay leaving my headphones in, but for now I use the accelerometer mode and my recumbent bike. The game is part fitness tool, part RPG. A narrative plays out as you run, interspersed with music from your playlists. As they say, it sounds a little weird with the bike, since the narrative is built around running, but I’ve got a good enough imagination to get around that (Unfortunately, zombie chases aren’t available in that mode yet, but they are working on it.) I discovered today that after a mission (about 25 – 30 minutes) the radio station mode isn’t just music, but fictional DJs too. That kept me going a little longer than I expected, which is a nice change.

At the moment, I’m finding that all the things I want to play in the evenings are centred around exercise, so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts. Now if I could just figure out a way to exercise while playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, that’d be perfect.

Oh well. At least this time I did putz about in between. I’m going to call that progress

Anyway, I started a 60-Day program tonight. I expect to have some issues with the holidays, but I’m going to do my best not to miss any of the scheduled days. I think I’m also going to try to do quick workouts on the off days instead of hit the mitts. We’ll see how that goes.

In other news, I finished my first pass through Rise of Nightmares, on the easy level. That means my avatar gets to sport a new T-shirt:

Now I get to play through a level of constantly spawning zombies for an achievement, and then through the storyline again at the harder levels, also for achievements. I like achievements

But this time I played through the last few levels, and then decided I wanted to go straight into the boss fight. Since I didn’t catch on to the mechanic (>_<) it took way longer than it should have. Actually, I’m surprised it worked at all. Anyway, the main point of this is that I was actually thinking I was going to lose because I was getting too tired to sidestep fast enough. That’s a very weird thought to have while playing a video game

And the next two days I just continued to slack off But I have now “unlocked” and tried every Hit the Mitts routine. The later stages have both hooks and elbows, though. Both of these appear to use the same arrow graphic. At least, I can’t tell the difference, which is okay, because the Kinect apparently can’t tell the difference between the moves.

I have been having a lot of fun with Rise of Nightmares, though. So far, the trickiest thing seems to be the movement, since most of the actions seem to be fairly self explanatory. Going forward and backward is simply done by keeping one foot in front or behind the other, though. That seems easy enough, but the Kinect sometimes seems to get confused about where centre is, and where the marks are. A couple of times this has led it to believe I want to go forward when I’m trying to go back (since either foot can be used for the movement, I’m assuming it reorients and uses my “center” foot as the forward instead). That wouldn’t be too bad, except that it happen in the room with the spinning blades down the centre, which means I got chopped in half

Anyway, it isn’t a work out the way the actual work out game is, but there’s something about hacking your way through a room of zombies that keeps you going. There’s a bit of a delay on the reaction times, but overall it’s not enough for more than an occasional swear, and I’m looking forward to more games like this coming out for the Kinect, so I hope this one succeeds.

Other than that, I attempted to play Star Wars: The Old Republic today, as part of their beta test weekend. The game looks great. I think I will enjoy playing it, assuming I can ever more. My lag was insane, to the point of being unable to play. I suffered through as long as I could, but gave up when I got attacked by a room of four droids, and could move reliably enough to run from one to another to take them out. Anyway, this means I have to look into improving my system, and/or improving my internet.

I find the second part of that more annoying, because I’m a little bitter against the drop in service quality from my service provider over the last year. I wish I could prove it was intentional, since it started around the same time they introduced more expensive tiers of service, but whatever. I guess I’ll suck it up. They keep sending me deals to try and tempt me into getting TV again, so I’ll probably take them up on that. Not being able to play during the test was a disappointment, though. Oh well, the game will be out soon enough.

Anyway, NaNo is almost over, and my plan is to start my 60-day program next week. I think I need to switch my off nights from Sun&Wed to Sun&Thurs, though, so I should check it tomorr– tonight, to see if this is when I should start it. That just occurred to me now. Maybe my fail will be shorter than I thought

I’m still putting NaNo ahead of the workouts, which means nothing much on this front. I’ve still been doing hit the mitts, but that’s about all.

I have learned that “locked” doesn’t seem to mean the same thing as any other game I’ve played, though. Despite being told you’ll open higher levels by playing others (which is how it usually works), it’s possible to play a locked level. After completing it, it unlocks. Which kind of makes the lock pointless. I don’t get it.

Anyway, I have “unlocked” the rest of the medium routines in this way, and will see if I can get at the hard ones when I get bored.

I have some time off this week, though, so I hope to have enough time to get in a real workout again. I’ve also picked up another Kinect game (Rise of Nightmares), which I’ve been looking forward to. That won’t be the same kind of workout, but at least it will get me moving for a little while.

I suspect I may fail the rest of the month. NaNoWriMo has me placing word count about workout in my list of priorities.

We’ll see. I may get my act together and get in both

• Sprawls
• Front Speed Hurdle Hops
• Side to Side Hurdle Hops
• Bicycle Crunches

Sprawls lose me at some point, no matter where I put the sensor, both types of hurdle hops work part of the time and then stop about half-way through, and the bicycle crunches only respond to some of the movements.

The hops I think is probably something changing in how I’m doing them, probably getting tired and sloppy But I can’t really tell, as jumping is not one of my strong skills. I may have to use a custom routine to troubleshoot or something. The crunches are probably a form things, too, since it only seems to be responding to one motion by one leg, when there’s two different types of arrows. I did spend one night slowing that one down to try and figure it out, but not luck yet.

I’m considering moving furniture again I might be able to arrange things so I don’t have to move the sensor, but it might mean keeping my desk/table clear, as I’ll have to fold one of the flaps down. That annoyance might be worth skipping the sensor annoyance, though.

The other thing I’m toying with is adding another exercise routine. I don’t get winded quite as easy, but that’s about the only result I’ve seen. I don’t have a lot of time, though, which means the program routine is all I’m doing. That’s probably not enough to see significant change.

My problem is that the only time I can think of to add requires waking up early. I suspect my father is either scoffing or laughing, and rightful so Getting up early is not likely; saying I’m not a morning person is understating by quite a bit. I’m going to think about that so more.

Me: Yup.

XBox: Really sure?

Me: Yeah, really sure.

XBox: What about the horrible, horrible exercises with terrible sensor interaction that had you rage all over your blog during the last program. Here, I’ll just give you that routine again, that’ll remind you.

Me: …

XBox: And this time I’ll make it four sets instead of three, because you liked that so much.

Me: …

XBox: Also, you said Greg Jackson’s work outs were going to kill you, so I’m just going to make sure he’s your trainer tonight.

Me: What the hell?

XBox: I love you.

I complain about the repetition in the workout, I get new routines based around my least favourite exercises, and ups the number of sets each night. Then I have a night where I’m on a time limit, and it gives me a long routine instead of a shorter one, and picks every waste of time in between thing in its repertoire.

Jerk.

Anyway, other than the string of hated exercises, not a bad week. Greg Jackson showed up one day, and has convinced me that I’m still not going to be able take on the 30 day lose weight program. I’d either quit or it’d kill me, neither of which are good outcomes.

My plan right now is to take on one of the 60 day programs next, though I’m not sure which one. I’ll figure it out after I get through the last week of this one.

At some point, I will get the “all three 30 day programs” achievement

That’s not entirely true. I think you hit the core and the cardio a lot earlier and a lot faster in the Build Strength program, but since they’d already been folded into the endurance one by the end, yeah.

The last week or so also seems to have pulled the exact same routiene for all of my “long” days (really, they’re not that long), and that’s hitting one of the two problems I have with maintaining exercise. The first is, of course, that it’s exercise I’m still doing okay on that score, though. But my second problem is boredom. The same thing every time begins to lose my focus, so it’s not hard to see why my luck with DVD workouts is abysmal. Until now, that hasn’t been a problem for this. Even if the same exercises show up, they’re usually in a different order, or at the very least they don’t show up in the same order more than once in a week or two.

But I’m hoping that’s an anomaly. Monday’s will be different, and even though it includes T push-ups which I hate, it’s got more of the arm exercises, which enjoy. I guess this week I’m building patience more than strength

Anyway, I did manage to get my workouts in every day, yay!  For the most part, these are routines that I saw during the Build Endurance program, but I think I’m into ones now that didn’t show up in the other program until the middle. I think I’ve also done all the easy hit the mitts routines now, so the next one I get should be a medium level. If I remember right, I’ve opened the first two medium ones, so I should get a new one soon.

That’ll be fun, since I’ve turned off the tutorials, and won’t know what the new stuff is if they add something that wasn’t included in any of the easy ones.

I’ve also finally told the game that I’m using hand weights on some exercises. I didn’t turn that setting on earlier, because I didn’t want to have to deal with them on other ones. Turns out I can still decide not to use weight on all exercises, which is nice. But I have to tell it what weight I’m using every freaking time, which is not so much. I understand why, since I have switched up on a few and did that in the middle of a routine once, but given I’m pretty much repeating sets, I’d like the ability to set it once for the whole night, at least.

There’s already a lot of tedious confirmation already (yes, I am on the ground for push-ups, yes I am standing now they’re over, yes I’m still here even though I had to move the damn sensor to get this one exercise to work) so adding more really wasn’t needed.

But, still doing good, and being able to move up a weight set felt good, even though they’re still really small weights.