Project Gutbuster

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Introduction

I am fat.

I'm not alone, either. Around 65 percent of American adults are also either overweight or obese, so I'm in good company. Along with 119 million of my countrymen and women, I'm putting myself at increased risk for heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, and being laughed at by children in the street.

I'm not disastrously fat, thankfully. With a height of 6' even, and a current weight of 203lb, my body mass index is somewhere around 27.5 This puts me squarely in the middle of the "overweight" category, and it's not a place I like to be. According to this high-tech scale I just bought, my current body fat proportion is 25 percent, which puts me teetering on the verge of the obese category. When 50lb of your body weight is composed entirely of lard, teetering is not something you want to be doing for long.

My condition, I suspect, is largely due to my sedentary lifestyle. Playing video games for a living is not conducive to physical fitness. I wasn't overweight when I was a child, a teenager, or even a young twenty-something, but I am now, and I don't like it.

On the whole, my diet is reasonable. I eat plenty of vegetables, few saturated fats, and stay away from junk food and fast food. I don't drink soda or other sugary drinks. In fact, I consume very little sugar in any form. I'm down with the five-to-nine portions of vegetables every day thing. I do sling down a few too many beers, but nobody's perfect. If anything, my diet now is better than it was when I was 22, six years ago, but I'm certainly not going to the gym like I was then.

Eyetoy Kinetic Eyetoy Kinetic

But enough of this Bridget Jones stuff. I'm fat because I spend most of my day sitting on my ever-expanding ass playing video games. I'm fortunate to be in the position to call it "work," of course, but that doesn't make it exercise. I am fat because energy in is greater than energy out, and given that I'm reluctant to mess with my not unreasonable diet, there's only one conclusion: I need more physical activity.

First, though, a bit of a digression. If you've opened a newspaper or watched a TV news program over the last few years, you'll know that video games aren't exactly enjoying the best of press at the moment. They're being blamed for everything: violent behavior in children and adults, negative attitudes to women, crime, and yes, obesity, especially in children. While I'm not going to touch the violence issue -- that's for another day -- video games can be part of the solution to the country's obesity problem, not necessarily the cause.