WRONG. Oh, so very wrong. I haven't so much thought about working out with Wii Fit since the last time winter.

And it shows. I'm now pushing 235 pounds. My cholestorel is through the roof and I have the energy of an 90-year-old asthmatic.

So, what am I to do?

My weight is yo-yoing around the 225 range and my BMI still hasn't dipped below 29 yet. As for my fit age - I've become the incredible fast-aging man, swinging from 29 a few days ago to 37 yesterday. I managed to pull it back to 35 this morning. (Mini Mii: "Geez dad, how many times are you going to be 35?)

I did manage to set new personal records in Ski Jump (360 meters) Soccer (310 points) and Advanced Balance Bubble (34 seconds) and I'm having fun getting back in the daily grove, despite oversleeping the first day and holding off until 10:30 a.m. yesterday to do my routine.

In any event, I thought I'd highlight some Web things I found.

Apparently, the brains behind comic strip Adam@Home has introduced a Wii Fit storyline into his strip.

I'm all in favor of comics that have modern-day references, considering most strips these days aren't remotely funny and several are just reruns of decades-old strips.

Of course, the posters on the above story seem to think this is a bad idea.

What's your thought?

A gym class at a middle school in Virginia Beach is incorporating Wii Fit into their exercise regiment.

But, there's more to the story. These kids have disabilities that make playing traditional sports difficult or impossible. Also, many of the kids have never even played a video game because traditional controllers are tough to hold.

There's a bit of confusion in the story, however. The reporter says the school requested a Wii Fit sytem, but refers to kids playing bowling on the Wii system. That of course, would be Wii Sports, not Wii Fit.

In any event, I think it's great that a school would find a way to incorporate Wii into education.

Locally, we have a rehabilitation center that uses Wii to help with therapy for kids and adults. They call it Wii-hab. Staff writer Kristi Funderburk wrote a great story about a few months back.

Kara Siena,5, of Vineland focuses on bowling while playing the Nintendo Wii at the SJ Healthcare Rehab. Healthcare is using the Nintendo Wii to help take away patients focus on pain. Staff photo/Craig Matthews

I was surprised to find the soccer and tightrope games made the list. I kind of expected Ski Jump would be the top spot, but I suppose I do spend a lot of time doing the bubble routine. (Seriously, how can I scoot through in quick time one go-round and then only make it a few feet the next time around?)

If Wii Fit counted both of the step routines as one that would certainly be my top spot.

So, what's in your favorites?

The Wii Fit manual tells you to go barefoot to improve traction and avoid slipping. But, since I work out at 6 a.m. in a cold basement, my feet are always cold while I'm Wii Fitting.

Cold feet + cold, hard plastic = not very comfortable.

Worse yet, once I get going and have a good sweat worked up, I get a sticky, tacky feel happening. (I know, this is several kinds of disgusting, isn't it?) So, I either deal with cold feet or sticky feet. Great choices.

I've tried wearing socks, but the manual is correct - it cuts into my traction and really puts me at risk of slipping.

I did find this neat little Wii Fit bundle available from several different sites.

It includes a board charger (LANCE just started warning me today his batteries were konking out), a workout mat (not a bad idea) a travel bag for the board (could have used that for the Vermont trip) a jelly-like cover for the board (not sure why you would want that) and a pair of socks with grippers on them.

But, the $50-ish price tag has me a little skittish.

I think I've got a pair of slipper socks with little grips on them somewhere in the sock drawer. Maybe I'll give them a try this week and see if that works. Of course, I'm going to feel like a complete dork doing it (so I'll take pictures to share with you.)

[poll id="5"]

Why won't me Mii turn the other way in the snowboard event?

I'm a goofy footed rider, which means I point my right leg down hill with my left leg in the back. I've been a goofy foot since I first started riding a skateboard around the age of 8. And since I grew up before skaters learned to ride switch stance, I've never been comfortable riding regular foot (left leg forward, right leg trailing.)

But, that's not how Mii rides in Wii Fit.

But, I can't get the hang of riding that way. I can get mad speed in a straight line riding regular foot, but since both Wii Fit snowboarding and real snowboarding require some ability to turn and stop, speed ain't everything.

As a result, I do the Snowboard Slalom with my feet in a goofy stance while Mii rides in a regular stance. Which means, every turn is done in mirror-image fashion.

No, it ain't easy. And as a result, I don't score very well in this event too often.

Today, I tried in vain to get Mii to spin around and go down hill the other way. It failed and I logged my worst ever time of 3 minutes to complete the course (counting all of the missed-gate penalties.) Yet, LANCE still only gave me credit for 1 minute of riding. Of course, I do get a full-minute credit each time I fall off the tightrope after 20 seconds, so I guess it balances out.

On a related note, in Shaun White Snowboarding you can make your rider switch stances during the run by sending him into a tight turn and then correcting after he comes around.

Perhaps, when Wii Fit 2 comes out it will include a switch-stance option.

Seems some Major League Baseball player used Wii Fit to get in shape for the upcoming season. He dumped 25 pounds to get down to 245 pounds. (Honestly, is that what a big league hurler comes in at? Wow.)

Heath Bell, a relief pitcher for the San Diego Padres, got into the Wii Fit habit when LANCE called him obese and made his Mii plump up.

Isn't that the motivation we've all had?

PEORIA, Ariz. (AP) — San Diego Padres reliever Heath Bell was initially bothered by comments from, of all things, a video game console.

But now the heir apparent to Trevor Hoffman credits his Nintendo Wii Fit game for helping him lose 25 pounds. Bell, who has been given the first crack at taking over the closing role vacated by Hoffman, reported to camp at a svelte 245 pounds.

After spending the previous 16 seasons in San Diego, Hoffman signed a one-year, $6 million contract with Milwaukee in January.

The opportunity to take over for Hoffman, who is baseball’s all-time saves leader, was more than enough motivation for Bell. But Bell, who was 6-6 with a 3.58 ERA in 74 games last season, received an extra boost when he began playing video games with his children this offseason. At the time, Bell weighed 270 pounds.

“It said I was obese,” Bell said. “If you’re obese, it makes (your character on screen) obese. I was disappointed that I was that big. I literally took the game to heart. I did the work but I kind of credit the Wii Fit.”

After coming over to San Diego in a November 2006 trade from the New York Mets, Bell reported to camp in 2007 at 250 pounds. The 31-year-old posted a 6-4 record with a 2.02 ERA, striking out 102 hitters in 93 2-3 innings in 2007. Getting his weight down became one of Bell’s primary goals and now he’s feeling good as he prepares to become a closer.

“It makes me feel good to hear the coaches say, ‘Don’t lose any more weight’ because they don’t want me to lose velocity,” Bell said. “I look stronger.”

 I'm not a baseball fan (the game moves too slow for my taste) but I'll be cheering Bell on this season.

I wanted to give a shout to Tommy Fusco.

He's embarking on another Wii Fit expirement. This time, he's trying to add weight.

But, like any real glutton for punisment, he's NOT going to add pounds simply by eating bacon and Moon Pies. (OK, apparently he's a vegan, so those things aren't likely in his diet anyway.) Tommy's going to use Wii Fit to add pounds through muscle mass and fine tune his body.

Let's all give Tommy a nod encouragement - and the stink eye for making us look bad.

I've been on blackout for the last week, unable to post here or do anything work related. So, I used that as an excuse not to Wii Fit. If you add in the previous week when I was in Vermont and away from LANCE and Wii Fit, you get more than two weeks of on-board inactivity.

Well, there's no pulling punches with LANCE, is there? It's not that I didn't play Wii at all, either. I logged in mad minutes playing Monster Jam Urban Assault. (Mini Mii and I had a marathon session in the car on the way home from Vermont and then went to the Monster Jam show in Philly last weekend, so we were on a bit of a Grave Digger and Blue Thunder kick for a bit.) I just made it a point not to do any Wii Fitting.

Grave Digger at Monster Jam at the Spectrum on Feb. 14.

In any event, I was expecting a run of bad news and finger-wagging from LANCE this morning. He didn't disappoint.

Ouch. That hurts. I really haven't been paying any attention to my eating habits over the last two-plus weeks. And it showed.

But, more painful than the weight and BMI scores was the flatline I got on my daily graph. I've grown accustom to seeing the peaks and valleys of regular use. Or at least the tiny little dots indicating my daily tests. This, however, was difficult to look at.

But, like  a true mashocist, I trudged on this morning. I did my body test and scored decent scores on the Basic Balance Test and Walking Test. But, I thought for sure the extra 3 pounds and half a BMI point would put my fitness age into the stratosphere.

I was wrong.

WOW. I wasn't expecting that.

I have to believe Wii Fit is working for me, especially when I pull in numbers like that. Again, this whole exercise has been about improving my balance and core strength - essentially, just making myself feel healthier.

I'll gladly accept 225 pounds as my average weight if the trade off is feeling like I'm still in my 20s. And considering most of my 20s were spent abusing my body and feeling much older than I was, being 28 today is both comforting and sort of new.

See you tomorrow, LANCE

The truth is, I've gotten lazy. And if there's any hope of making my Wii Fit goal of losing 22 pounds, I'll need to settle into some kind of routine to start getting results. Even the high-pitched, nagging, animated Wii balance board has begun to lose faith in me. This much was evident when it saw that, after two weeks, I'd lost no weight. It gave me a chance to reconsider those semi-unrealistic goals of mine.

To make matters worse, I'm constantly reminded by The Daily Journal's umpteen bajillion wrestling live blogs just how undisciplined I am compared to a bunch of high schoolers.

Time to buckle down. In the interest of simply getting a workout in every day, I've decided to back off on the pilates and yoga routines. While those are clearly the most direct path to fitness and weight loss, there's also the closest you get on the Wii to feeling like I'm really at the gym. Which was what I was trying to avoid (or at least minimize) in the first place.

Fortunately, though, there are two other key ways to use Wii Fit to get my heart pumping -- balance games and aerobic exercises. And happy day, the ones I've recently unlocked are hella fun.

The boxing aerobics exercise is my favorite by far. It's basically a combination of Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Sports boxing, where you use the balance board to keep in step with the footwork, and the Wiimote/nunchuck to hit a punching bag with the proper left-right combinations. I love it. Even though my instructor had harsh words for me at the end of my workout, you can tell by the dumbass grin on my Mii how happy the routine made me.

Equally fun and entertaining was the newly unlocked snowboarding balance game. In this one, you reposition the Wii balance board so it's perpendicular to the TV screen, and then try to sway forward and back to control how your board carves through the course. As with real-life snowboarding, it took me a while to get the hang of leaning back to turn right, and leaning forward to turn left, but once I did I started tearing up the slopes.

The most addictive of all: the balance bubble game.

This one is like Super Monkey Ball for the iPhone, except that instead of rolling some monkey character around a mouse maze, you're the one in the bubble. You shift your weight from side to side, and front to back, to direct which way your bubble rolls. You're trying to navigate a stream in Wii land, and if you accidentally graze the shoreline, your bubble goes kablooey.

I spent an eternity in 45-second increments trying to beat the first level. Like any good Wii game, it was simple to get the hang of, yet next to impossible to master. When at long last I finally crossed the finish line, it dawned on me that I'd logged my longest workout to date -- 32 minutes -- and had hardly even noticed the time going by.

Who knows how good a workout I got from swaying side to side for a half-hour, but for now I'm just happy to be back on the Wii Fit wagon.