Well, I did it. I completed my 30 day gaming fitness challenge. I played exercise games for 30 days and maintained a (mostly) healthy diet. Here are my results and observations.
This was probably the most gung ho I’ve been about fitness, albeit for a short time. I was not a hundred percent faithful to the original plan, but I was pretty close, so I’m not beating myself up too bad. I managed to work out every day but one and that was because I got sick. My diet deteriorated a bit toward the end. That said, it was still much better than the beer and pizza I used to live off of.
According to my Fitbit, I had a calorie deficit every single day, but I don’t think that was accurate. Of course, anytime you’re counting calories there’s going to be some estimation involved. Not every chicken breast is the same size for instance. Also, I realized a couple weeks in that when I look up a food on the Fitbit app, the nutrition information that comes up is not always accurate. Even scanning a barcode, the calorie count of the food does not match the label sometimes. I also forgot to include the olive oil that I cooked things in, which was a pretty big omission. Whoopsy-doodle.
That said, I still managed to lose about seven pounds, going from 191.1 to 183.3, which is about what I expected. I didn’t quite make the light heavyweight limit of 175, but my goal was never really weight loss to begin with. I just wanted to get in better cardiovascular shape and turn flab into muscle. As for the first part, I definitely feel more spry, and I have more energy and stamina. But as for gaining muscle, I could feel a change, but I didn’t really see much change. I had to add in some pushups and other resistance exercise. Here’s a picture of the results.
Thirty days is really not that long when it comes to fitness. To see more significant results, I would need to keep at it much longer. The fitness games I played were really good for cardiovascular exercise. My resting heart rate dropped a full five beats per minute, and my sleep cycle is better. I realized many other benefits as well, but as you can see, there wasn’t too much change to my body’s appearance. My arms did get stronger from all the punches in boxing games. I was able to channel that into more reps of pushups and other resistance type exercises. My legs are stronger too from all the cycling in VZfit. That said, if I want to put on a lot of muscle, the games probably are not enough.
Going forward, I want to keep up as many parts of this routine as I can, though I know I won’t be able to keep it up 100%. With the cooking, the exercise, and the tracking everything, it was just too time consuming. I averaged about 43 minutes of exercise per day (and over 500 calories burned) plus tack on some time for shower and changing clothes afterward. I cooked in bulk, but I still spent an hour or more on cooking a couple times per week. This was one of the reasons I fell off a bit towards the end. I think if I set the time commitment a little lower I’ll still be able to do a lot.
Thank you for reading this and best of luck on your own fitness journey.