"Wii Fit" helps you feel the burn

To answer your first question: Yes, I did indeed feel the burn.

On the heels of another long, cold Seattle winter, I felt it more than I thought I would. After all, this is the time of year when I expose my parchment-white limbs to the sun's rays for the first time in months. I take stock of the damage caused by ordering all those butter-laden muffins for breakfast, rather than the vegan bran bars that I should have had. In other words, the perfect time for "Wii Fit" to enter my life.

Not surprisingly, I'm not alone. The new "Wii Fit" game and its accompanying Balance Board ($90, rated E for everyone) are currently back-ordered on Amazon and other Web sites. Lots of us are feeling a little flabby, it seems, and looking to Nintendo to provide the solution.

The Balance Board resembles a wider-than-average bathroom scale. It reads your movements when you stand on it or (in the case of push-ups) place your hands on it. After configuring the Balance Board to be recognized by your Wii and going through a brief initial body scan, the game gives you your BMI (Body Mass Index) and your "Wii Fit Age."

Your Wii Fit Age is based on your weight, real age and balance. Let's just say my Wii Fit Age registered about 10 years later than my actual age. Just five minutes after cracking open the box, "Wii Fit" was showing itself to be a cruel taskmaster.

The game has four types of exercises: yoga, aerobics, strength training and something called "balance games." Initially, a few types of activities are available per category, but logging time unlocks additional activities.

For yoga, players are assigned a trainer — choose a woman or a man, both in spooky shades of gray with eerily calm voices — who show you how to do every exercise. Because the Balance Board reads your movements, your trainer delivers encouragement if you're doing well or stern words if you step off the board.

This game has a few things going for it. First, novelty. We're the nation who made Tae-Bo and pole-dance workouts coast-to-coast crazes, so we clearly can't be trusted to show sound judgment when novelty exercise is involved. Anything that promises to make life more interesting while you work out has no ceiling for success.

Equally compelling is the idea that "Wii Fit" tracks your progress, including any weight loss or improvement in your BMI. The same techniques that work so successfully in Nintendo's "Brain Age" series — which provides timed memory puzzles and records the results to show improvement over time — are in full effect here. What gamer doesn't want to see their graph improve, even if it means sweating in the living room?

And essentially, the "Wii Fit" is a mass-market biofeedback device. As you stand on one leg, doing the Tree yoga stance, a dancing dot on the screen indicates where you should be holding steady, adjusting your balance and positioning. By showing you exactly what you're doing wrong, it pushes you to improve and to keep from dropping out of an exercise routine at rep number three of six.

Believe me, I've spent many hours "doing yoga" with DVD yoga guru Rodney Yee, when really all I was doing was sitting on the couch watching him go to town on a Proud Warrior stance. "I have to observe his techniques," I'd tell myself, wondering if there was any cheese still in the fridge. "Wii Fit" puts a stop to that.

I'm a gamer, not a yoga teacher or trainer. But in my experience, the game did provide a workout. After about 20 minutes, I got downright shaky, which likely has more to do with my utter lack of exercise all winter than with the Wii's motivating powers. By the time I was doing push-ups followed by side planks, I was worried I might fall over and take the Balance Board with me.

Luckily, I thought of a way to recover soon after: a mini-pint of Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. Maybe with "Wii Fit," I can have my cake-flavored ice cream and eat it, too?

Jennifer Buckendorff is a frequent contributor to The Seattle Times.