Wii Fit U, eight months in

Fuck yeah, 100 pounds down and at my Scientifically Determined Ideal Weight™, which is 153 pounds.  In other words, I'm at my goal weight.  Since reaching this weight, which totally happened at MAGFest, I've been content to stay in the ballpark of it.  Ideally I'd like that ballpark to be a bit under 100 pounds down, just so I can always truthfully say that I've lost 100 pounds, but if I can be this weight 20-30 years from now, I'll take it.

As always, more after the break.

Wii Fit U, seven months in

No miraculous amount of weight lost in the last month.  In fact, I plateaued for a lot of it, while still managing to hit my target of losing 10 pounds in a month.  I don't think I'll be able to keep that up any further, though, because of the aforementioned plateauing.  Regardless, here's the graph.

More after the break!

Wii Fit U, six months in

Just like last month where I lost 14 pounds, I got the complement of 16 this month in order to get that extra ten pounds.  I'm now 80 pounds down, and have 20 to go until I reach my Scientifically Determined Ideal Weight™, which is of course what I will weigh if I can get my BMI to 22.00.

Anyway, descriptions of things and general complaining and whatnot after the break.

Wii Fit U, five months in

Still going strong.  I'm down by 64 pounds at this point.  It looks like I'm plateauing, but I'm not really.  I'm having fewer random weight gains, and to go along with it, the weight losses are also getting smaller.  However, I'm still losing about the same amount per month.  So, there's still confidence.  The plateau will come eventually, don't get me wrong, but hopefully not for another month or two.

My pre-MAGFest goal is 80 pounds down, which is more than achievable at my current rate of weight loss.  Honestly, I might be able to get closer to 90 if things work out right, which would be amazing since the magical 22 BMI that Wii Fit U says is ideal is pretty much exactly 100 pounds down for me.  Let's do things differently and stick the picture of my last month's graph up here instead of down at the bottom!

And now, how about a jump break!  Look at me!  It's almost like I'm a real blogger!

Exercising During A Hurricane

Hurricane Matthew humped the East Coast for a while and dumped a bunch of rain on us.  Including at 2 AM when I'm normally out on my walk-that's-slowly-becoming-a-run.

A fun thing about the Fit Meter is that it calculates your relative altitude changes based on air pressure, which varies by altitude.  The lower the air pressure, the higher the altitude, essentially.  However, this is only good for relative measure since air pressure is completely weather-dependent.  High pressure generally means nicer weather while low pressure generally means a storm's a-brewin'.  Hurricanes are, of course, massive low pressure systems.

So, a couple nights ago, while Hurricane Matthew was busy humping the East Coast, I was out and about being awkward carrying an umbrella while doing my thing, and my Fit Meter was gathering air pressure data and trying to convert that into relative altitude.  Here's the result:

Yeah.  Normally it hovers around the zero line, as could be expected.  Fun times.  Also, obligatory song link.

Wii Fit U, four months in

Milestones!


Yeah, that's right.  I'm no longer a part of America's obesity problem.  You know, according to BMI.  They had to draw a line in the sand somewhere.  I'm still overweight and have a lot of work ahead of me, but it's an important milestone nonetheless.  I planned on posting these pictures on twitter, but procrastinated the image editing and then things happened.

I tried jogging, but I did it wrong at first.  I tried jogging the first portion of each lap and walking the rest, which resulted in my legs going NOPE by the end of the third lap.  My new solution that's working so far is to just jog the first portion of the first lap, and simply gradually increase the distance I jog as I feel able to do more.

Also, on September 1st, Wii Fit U changed all its graphics to the fall variants.  Island Cycling now has pretty fall colors on the trees, and for some reason, two desolate shades of yellow for most of the grass.  Someone get Nintendo on the line and tell them that grass stays green year-round...

Anyway, standard graph of the last month or so.  Notice how annoying Wii Fit U is getting with the "EXPLAIN YOURSELF" after trivial weight gains that disappear the next day.  Also, towards the end there's a rise in calories burned, I kinda went into crunch time to make sure I'd be 50 pounds down and continue the trend I've been setting thus far.  An extra walk per day is what that amounted to, which is totally within my realm of capability.

I have three milestones that all occur together: leaving the Obese BMI range, reaching 50 pounds down, and getting under 200 pounds.  I've already reached two of the three, and I'll be able to easily reach the third within the next week or so.  Things are looking pretty good overall.

Oops.

So, Friday evening I went for my walk like usual.  However, partway through the walk I completely lost track of what lap I was on.  Naturally, being aware of when I left and the pace I usually walk at, I looked at my watch to figure it out.  Given the time, I determined I must be on the second lap, so I did another lap after that one and went back inside.

When I fired up Wii Fit U and transferred the Fit Meter data, I saw this:

Each lap of my walk has a very distinctive set of spikes and dips in altitude, given that my neighborhood is hilly as fuck.  It's very easy for me to tell where I was in the neighborhood at any point on the graph just by looking at the altitude and taking it into context.  But the pattern is repeated four times, not three.

I accidentally an extra lap.

So Saturday evening I did four laps again, purposefully this time.

I guess I'm doing four laps now.

Go me?

Wii Fit U, three months in

Things are still going pretty smoothly.  Really smoothly in fact.  Buttery smooth.  Like a hot knife through a baby's bu- well, you get the idea.

Before I go any further, though, I want to preface this with a note.  Fortunately, I don't have to type it, because I already did.  I dumped this spaghetti already on /r/mindcrack, where I've been doing short monthly posts about this whole thing in the Free Talk Friday threads.

I changed absolutely nothing, and my body seems to have kicked it into overdrive.  Last month I was 233, right?  Well, guess what.  I'm 213 now.  20 pounds in a month is fucking insane.  I don't really want to keep that pace going, but again I'll stress that I did nothing differently.  Well, maybe that's a lie.  I'm eating a serving of Lay's potato chips every day now.  But that's a relatively recent thing, the massive losses that started this thing happened well before that, and I've continued losing weight despite the potato chips.

What massive losses were they?  The first one was five pounds in two days.  The second one, a few days later, was another five pounds or so across three days.

With all this weight lost, it's only natural to start noticing things, right?  Well, there's the obvious thing that it's way easier for me to get in and out of a car now.  I can also bend over and tie my shoes without running out of breath.  On the negative side, I seem to have lost enough fat from my ass that it now actually kinda hurts to sit on a wooden chair.

This next MAGFest is gonna be awesome being this much lighter.  I wonder if the foot pain issues I've had in the past few MAGFests are still going to be a problem.  They persisted even with supportive footwear and switching my staff shifts from floor staff to desk staff so I could sit down and take some weight off my feet.  Also, if it's any indication of awesomeness, when MAGFest opened preregistrations and hotel reservations, the hotel sold out within 24 hours, and the pre-reg server promptly shat itself from the traffic.  I was there with my email with the link to confirm my staff badge going "damn, this thing just isn't loading".  It took them several days of maintenance to get it back up, this time much more able to handle the volume of traffic.  I claimed my badge, which meant...  it was time.

"Time for what?", you ask?  Well.  Last year I had to get a 2XL shirt, because I couldn't fit into an XL shirt anymore.  Having to move up to 2XL shirts was one of my motivators for losing some weight.  So, it was time to try on one of my many XL shirts and see what size I should request.

Guess what?

I can wear my XL shirts again.

That's awesome.

If you've met me in real life since the latter portion of last year, you may have noticed that I've been wearing these featureless shirts in various colors (white, black, grey) that I got for cheap at K-Mart.  Those were 2XLs.  All my shirts with the various funny or geeky things on them are all XL shirts (for the most part, a couple are actually 2XLs like the "Make 7/Up Yours" shirt).  I went from having eight shirts available to wear, to an entire closet full of shirts to choose from once again.

I wonder if my polo shirts and khakis fit once again.  If so, that's gonna make trying to get a job a bit easier.  If I can get anybody to hire me.  "Overqualified" is the biggest load of bullshit that anyone's ever made up, except maybe for the anti-vax "argument", or the 2016 election where we get to choose between a bigot and a criminal.  I don't care what my qualifications are, I want a job in receiving somewhere so I can be active all day.

Anyway, the graph.  Standard complaint about Wii Fit U not letting me use Miiverse to screenshot it goes here.  Also, I finally got the balance test to be happy, so there's a Miiverse screenshot of that as well.


Let's hope the future is as bright as the present, shall we?

Wii Fit U, two months in

Well, everything's going quite well so far.  I'm continuing my trend of losing about 10 pounds a month, which averages out to less than a pound a day.  The actual graph obviously looks nothing like that, but it's the trend you have to pay attention to, not the individual spikes and dips.

Funny I should mention that, because Wii Fit U gets way too caught up in the spikes and dips.  On top of that, it's inconsistent.  It's made me explain a 1.1 pound gain before, but I've had a couple 3 and 4 pound gains that it was apparently fine with.  It sees that I'm burning enough calories to meet and exceed my daily calorie goal, notices that my weight is up, and goes "EXPLAIN YOURSELF".  You get a choice between eight reasons why you gained weight, most of which are either judgmental or imply that you're not really fully in it to win it, as they say.  The only choice I've ever chosen is "I don't know", and sometimes, it's not even satisfied with that.  It'll go "Do you really not know?".

It thinks you're constantly trying to cheat the system.  It thinks you're trying to avoid exercise and that you're not eating correctly.

On top of that, a lot of the exercises get too caught up in being "games", to the point that the game they're trying to be gets in the way of the exercise itself.  In a lot of cases, things have countdown timers where I feel as though they should have countup timers.  Sometimes input recognition is an issue, like with the rowing exercise and Puzzle Squash.

In the rowing exercise, you have to row at the right time in order to go faster, but sometimes it feels like the game just wants to take a shit on you.  Lately I've been getting completely random, unexplainable "nope, you didn't do something right" failure noises, and with them, much slower times than I'm used to.  The game offers zero feedback as to what it thinks I'm doing wrong.  In Puzzle Squash, it just decides whether you're going to do forehand or backhand, even when what it's decided on is less intuitive than what you really want to do.  That, and it limits you to three balls.  If you let those three go past you, it ends the exercise early.  Also, sometimes it recognizes my movement of the wiimote to get ready to hit the ball as a swing, and then it goes into a forced cooldown between swings and I can't actually swing to hit the ball, causing a miss.  Get that crap out of here, give me unlimited balls.

Input recognition was such an issue with the Luge exercise that I removed it from my routine entirely.  It's so prohibitively difficult to get off the damn banking that it gets in the way of the exercise.  You have to basically roll all the way onto your side to steer far enough, and even then the game doesn't really want to let you off the banking.

Also, there's things the game just flat-out doesn't tell you about some exercises.  I'm thinking mainly Island Cycling here.  While you're riding around collecting the checkpoints, you'll find a dog, which is cute, and follows you around.  For the longest time I thought it was just decorative.  Then at some point, I discovered that the A button rings a bell, so naturally I started tapping out various songs and whatnot.  I soon noticed that the dog reacts to the bell, and that you can use the dog to get checkpoints.  Since the goal is to have the shortest distance you possibly can, using the dog to optimize your route is crucial to success.  In fact, on Beginner I was able to get Shortcut Champion without dog optimizations, simply because I didn't know you could use the dog at all, and I found a route through the checkpoints that got me Shortcut Champion every time.  On Advanced, however, dog optimizations seem to be required if you want to get Shortcut Champion, and if you don't use them, you get Shortcut Pro instead.  There's one required dead end on the route no matter how you string the checkpoints together, and my best route so far inserts another dead end close to the beginning.  Using the dog to collect the checkpoints at these dead ends means you can turn around sooner, meaning you don't have to cover as much distance.  The cutoff distance for Shortcut Champion on Advanced seems to be 2.47 miles, and with my route and dog optimizations, I've gotten it down to 2.41 miles.

I could go on listing additional gripes.  Wii Fit U is my most-played game on the Wii U, which is fitting since I bought the console specifically for it.  I play the game for an hour every day, and do the same routine every day.  Thus, I experience the things that cause my gripes every day.  Even then, my gripes are far outweighed by the fact that I'm losing weight.  It's still been a really good purchase for me, even if all the required materials did end up costing around $400.  I plan to continue, mainly because I want to lose all this weight.

I see no reason to keep the details hidden, either.  Since I acknowledged that I was overweight and became determined to do something about it, part of that is accepting that I'm not currently in a perfect state.  So.  I started out at 253 pounds.  Before the added activity began to kick in, I actually gained weight for the first week.  Since then, though, it's been a downward trend, leading up to the end of the second month where I was 233 pounds.  My mom always said that once you get started, your body will tell you what to do next, and that sounded kind of weird, but it's totally right.  One day you'll go "you know what, I wanna do this" or "you know what, this one thing I'm eating I could probably be better off without".  With the Fit Meter, Wii Fit U encourages you to have activity outside of playing the game, which I've implemented so far as a nightly walk around the neighborhood.  My neighborhood is fairly hilly, with a really big hill that I incorporated into the walk.  I started out at just one lap, but I've worked my way up to doing three laps.  I soak a shirt in sweat in the meantime, and I take a bottle of water with me to consume as I walk.  But you know what?  It's working.

Just like before, here's a graph.  Since the game won't let me use Miiverse to screenshot it, I had to use my phone.  The red dots are where the game made me explain weight gains.  However, there's that nice 4 pound spike in there that it was apparently fine with.  That was July 4th, go figure.  More important than the spike itself is the fact that two days later the extra weight was gone.

So, to summarize my point about spikes, dips, and trends: If your diet/exercise combination is working for you, a spike is nothing to be worried about, because you'll work it off, guaranteed.  This means that even while losing weight, you can afford to have a treat every now and again.  Don't do it all the time, of course, but... reward yourself every now and then.

Wii Fit U Part 2 - My Personal Experiences

So, I bought a Wii U for the express purpose of playing Wii Fit U.  I was determined from the beginning to give it a shot, after all, what do I have to lose?  Only unwanted weight.

After doing all the initial setup stuff, it was time for my first Body Test, to see where I stood weight-wise.  I had a general ballpark that I was expecting my weight to be in, which was in the 270-280 range.  This cued my first bit of happiness, in that I was only 253 pounds.  Still, though, for my height (5'10"), this is enough to have a BMI in the mid-30s, placing me off the top of the game's BMI range labelled "Obese".  It became clear that I had a lot of work ahead of me.

I've heard from various sources that BMI can be flawed in some situations, but I'm not sure if that applies to me.  The game claims my ideal weight is around 150 pounds.  I've always thought it would be nice to be around 180 pounds, personally.

The other metric the game uses is calories.  It helpfully informs you of how it calculates calories burned based on the intensity of the exercise, measured in METs, and some other factors.  I can't really vouch for how accurate it is, because I don't know enough about these sorts of calculations myself.

I initially started out doing 30 minute workouts, but quickly jumped up to an hour because I noticed I was just getting going at the end of the 30 minutes.  An hour had me feeling pretty worn out, so I feel like that's right for me.

I went into this with an experimentative mindset.  I wasn't very active to begin with, so my first question was "how much can I get out of just increasing my level of activity by itself?".  After all, I'd had a prior experience while living in the apartment and doing contract work for Silverchair.  I basically ate whatever I wanted, parked somewhat far from Silverchair where I could park for free, and walked in from and back out to my car every day.  While still continuing to eat whatever I wanted, I noticed after a while that I wasn't completely exhausted when I got into the building, so I started taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

I will note that I didn't make stupid dietary decisions while eating "whatever I wanted".  I had a fairly regimented meal setup: breakfast was a bowl of Quaker Apples and Cinnamon oatmeal, supplemented with some coffee once I got into the office.  Lunch was a stir fry concoction of vegetables, buckwheat noodles, beef, and some sort of garlic+ginger sauce, all put on a 6" hoagie roll; supplemented with a Chocolate and Peanut Crunch Clif Bar and a can of Sprite Zero.  Dinner was one of three things: a Bird's Eye skillet meal, pre-made pasta (either ravioli or tortellini) with one or another Classico pasta sauce, or my usual at Bodo's, which is a whole wheat bagel with pastrami, provolone, mustard, and pepper spread.  I ended up in the habit of walking to a nearby convenience store around 2 or 3 in the afternoon to grab a snack, usually this was a bag of chips or pretzels and a 20 oz. drink.

Every now and then I'd go to Cook-Out or Sticks or something just to change things up, but my point is already clear: by simply increasing my activity level to above zero, I was beginning to feel better.

Well, the first week of Wii Fit U was a bit rocky.  I gained weight overall, and it spiked up and then back down twice.  But then, after the second spike, it kept going down.  Not as fast, but it kept going down.  It's had a couple of spikes since then, but I've already noticed that I can easily deal with the spikes by just sticking to my routine.

My diet was already quite good.  It's been low on fats and oils for a while now, and relatively high in fiber thanks to whole grain everything ever.  I did, however, make a minor and very easy change to my diet.  I have a hankerin' for some frozen snacks, and most if not all of these sorts of things are incredibly bad for you, or at least they are in the quantities that I was consuming.  I didn't get rid of the frozen snacks, but I did replace them with much more healthy things.  I've got a cache of lightly sauced frozen vegetable mixes and Campbell's Chunky Soup.  I typically eat the vegetable mixes along with a couple White Castle Jalapeño Cheeseburgers, just to get some meat in there.  Even before I settled on this, I was enjoying Totino's pizza rolls in smaller quantities, basically just heating up one serving at a time instead of half the bag at a time, without it really affecting my weight loss.

Other than playing Wii Fit U and making that minor diet change, I've started taking walks around the neighborhood.  One of the only good things about Central Virginia is that it's very hilly terrain, which is great for burning some calories.  A lap around my neighborhood is about a mile and takes about 15-20 minutes depending on how fast I walk, which is pretty fast to begin with.  Recently I started being less winded after one lap, so I bumped it up to two laps.  If I start getting less winded after that, I'll bump it up to three.  I probably won't go any further than that, though, because I'll be pushing an hour at that point.  If I take the Fit Meter with me, I can keep track of all of that and get credit for it in-game, which contributes a lot towards me meeting my calorie goal.

Speaking of the calorie goal, I've already noticed that it's not everything in the equation.  For the most part I've actually been falling short on my calorie goal and still losing weight.  So, just keep that in mind.

Also, with regards to weight loss, there are no "quick and easy" answers.  Anyone else who tells you otherwise is lying and probably trying to sell you something.  Healthy weight loss takes time and perseverance.  Once you begin tracking your values and working to lower them, you may not see a benefit immediately.  Recall that I actually gained weight in my first week of being more active.  All you need to do is find something that works for you and keep at it.  Whether that something is Wii Fit U, or a gym membership, or buying some weights and running shoes and whatnot, it's most important that it's something you feel that you can do.

I like Wii Fit U because it makes a game out if weight loss.  It harnesses the gamer's natural drive to want to do better at the game and get better scores, and it turns those better scores into weight loss.  I can lose weight while doing something I enjoy, which I'm quite pleased with.  I personally feel like the ability to get fit in a way that works for me was worth the $400 price tag for a Wii U, the Wii Fit U + Balance Board + Fit Meter bundle, and two Wiimotes.

Now, because the game supports taking screenshots via Miiverse, here's some images.  I've noticed that it's incredibly picky about your center of balance, wanting you to have exactly 50/50 balance.  While good balance is important, I feel like it's not as important to have it be perfectly in the center as the game makes it out to be.  It actually complains that your balance isn't perfect when it's 50.1%/49.9%...

Also, my workout is split up into all three of the routines you get under My Routine.  The first one is my warmup, then there's the actual workout itself, then finally the cooldown.  At the end of each, it updates you on a few things like how long you've been working out for, calories burned, and how many calories you've got left for your daily goal.  Well, I suppose it was inevitable, but this happened one time at the end of my warmup...

I will leave you with one more picture, which is an indicator of my progress so far in the one month I've been playing Wii Fit U.  The four red dots are when the game decided to ask me to explain why I'd gained the weight I'd just gained.  It offers you eight cookie-cutter reasons to pick from, none of which truly explained each gain, and all of which seem incredibly judgmental, so I just selected "I don't know" for all of them.  The bigger picture is that in the month that's gone by since I started playing Wii Fit U, I've lost ten pounds.  Miiverse refused to screenshot this for some reason, so I had to take a picture of this screen with my phone.

I'll probably do Wii Fit U check-in posts periodically, as I hit milestones and whatnot.  This is something that's very important to me, so it's gonna get done, dammit.

Wii Fit U Part 1 - The Game Itself

Wii Fit U does a lot of things right.  After each workout, it gives you a score based on how well you did during the workout.  Any gamer who sees a score is naturally going to want to make that score higher.  Video game numbers are better when they're bigger, after all.  This basically tricks the player into getting fit as they try to beat their high scores.

At its core, Wii Fit U is a set of exercises, categorized into Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, Dance, and Balance Games.  It gives you a variety of ways to meander about its set of exercises.  The simplest one simply just has you select an exercise, and then when you're done, it suggests two more and you pick one.  This is probably the easiest way to get acquainted with the exercises themselves, as you always have the option to go back out to the menu and manually choose another exercise even if it isn't one of the ones being suggested.  It's also the way to unlock longer, more challenging versions of the exercises.

If you'd rather have the game decide for you, there are two options.  One of them categorizes the exercises into various aspects of your life or physical wellness you might want to improve.  I honestly haven't tried this option.  The next is the Personal Trainer.  Here, you select either the amount of calories you want to burn, or an amount of time you want to work out for, and it picks the exercises to fit the goal you set.

Finally, once you become acquainted with the exercises available in the game, you can go into My Routines and set up a maximum of three exercise routines, by simply picking exercises from the list and moving them around until they're in your desired order.  Doing one of your routines is really simple, you just select one and hit the nice big button that says Start.

My only gripe about My Routines is that you can't unlock the more longer and more challenging versions of exercises while you're doing one of your routines.  The game still tracks your high scores, but My Routines goes for as little "press A to begin" and as few dialog box confirmations as possible, so you don't actually get presented with your high scores and any dialogs it does show will auto-advance.  I guess I'll just have to go back out and select exercises individually to unlock those longer and more challenging versions, and--hey waitaminute, this is another way the game tricks you into getting fit, because you'll end up wanting to unlock something, so you go and select that exercise to unlock whatever you can, and you get more exercise in the process.  I see what you did there, Nintendo...

When you start up the game, though, one of the first thing the game wants you to do is the Body Test.  This is basically a check-in sort of thing where it assesses your progress so far.  My only gripe with it is that it makes me too aware of my current weight.  I'd much rather just play the game and only check my weight every couple of weeks.  At the same time, it's nice to be able to see the gains and losses so you can try to equate them to things you either did or didn't do.  If only it would present its graphs with unlabelled axes.

The game has a calendar, and every day you do the Body Test, you get to put a stamp on the calendar.  After a while, the game unlocks additional stamps for you to use, which is neat from a graphical variety point of view, as well as from a "keep the player coming back" point of view.

In addition to the Balance Board, the game also uses a Fit Meter that clips onto the waist of your pants or whatever waist-level garment you happen to be wearing.  It tracks various things like steps taken, altitude change, and calories burned, and every time you play the game it'll have you transfer the data over so you can update all your graphs and whatnot.  There are two minigames relating to the Fit Meter, the Walking Challenge and the Altitude Challenge, where your number of steps and whatnot count towards walking around or up various cities or landmarks.  I don't know what metric they're using to convert the number of steps into distance covered, but they're neat regardless.  The Fit Meter's purpose is obviously to encourage you to be active outside of when you're playing the game, and every aspect of its design makes it suitable for that.  I often forget I'm wearing it.

An annoyance for me, since I do my workouts at 1 or 2 in the morning, is that the game really wants me to change one of its settings.  It has a setting that controls when it ticks over to a new day, and you can choose between midnight and 3 AM.  Well, considering that I'm often still doing my workout at 3 AM, and that logically speaking, the date changes at midnight and no other time, I'm leaving it at midnight, but the game just. won't. shut. up. about. it.

I don't necessarily advise you to use the Personal Trainer right away, especially if you're not very physically fit.  Some of the Yoga and Strength Training exercises are marked as "For Advanced Users Only", and require a lot of flexibility and body control that you're just not going to have if you aren't already physically fit.  Trust me, I had one ill-fated Personal Trainer run that had about six or seven of these, it wasn't very fun and I didn't really get a lot out of it.

If you're new to all this, or you're like me and buying the requisite console as well as the Wii Fit U box that comes with the game, Balance Board, and Fit Meter, you'll need two Wiimotes.  A fair number of the exercises will have you hold at least one Wiimote so it can use motion tracking or button presses or whatever.  Some exercises can also use the Nunchuck if you happen to have one, but anywhere a Nunchuck can be used, you can also use a second Wiimote.  I find a second Wiimote to be the better choice, given that not all exercises use the Nunchuck.  If you're going the Nunchuck route, you'll have to plug it in and unplug it as necessary, which I can see being a hassle.

I'm not sure why you'd want to play the game multiplayer, but some exercises (mostly the balance games) have two-player versions available.  Also, it's not just a single-user game, you can let someone else play on a guest profile, or have them register another profile so they can track their stats.  They'll need to buy their own Fit Meter, though.

One thing the game alerts you to straight away when you run it the first time is the existence of the Wii Fit U Quick Check application.  It's a small download that enables you to transfer over your Fit Meter data or do a Body Test, but not enough time for a full workout.  I generally don't use it, but I've got it there in case I do ever need it.

Overall: Wii Fit U is an excellent way for someone like me who's overweight and into video games to get fit, and we'll see what happens.  In my next post, I will cover my personal experience with the game in greater detail, and go on a bit about the psychological aspect of losing weight.