Tag Archives: CVG WRONG

Fat Gamer: Chapter Two

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Another week has passed and I’m already failing at becoming a “healthy gamer”…

My soul feels drained of life, I feel undernourished and I just don’t feel like myself any more… I haven’t touched any “real” games in a week… This is not good.

I’ve managed to squeeze in a couple of games of Street Fighter: Volt on my iPhone, but it’s not enough. I did manage to get as far as booting up Steam once, in an effort to continue my reign of terror in Civ 5 and finally crush the French under my English boots, but then I got distracted by something else… Something that surely couldn’t have been more important than bringing the English nation into yet another Golden Age, could it?…

Oh yes, that’s right… the real English nation was collapsing in on itself.

Despite the riots going on around me, I still managed to remain on track with the running, with 3 more runs under my slightly looser belt! A little self-centred, I know, but you came here to read about a diet, not a riot. The “diet”, if you can call it that, is going well. I’m remaining under my calories for the week, despite slipping up a couple of days, and I’m feeling much more energised and much less hungry. I’ve even received a few comments this week about looking a little slimmer, although I can’t let these go to my slightly-less-fat head and get complacent, there’s still a long road ahead.

My current goal with regards to the running is to be able to run 5k in under 30 minutes. It’s not a massively difficult task for most people, but I’m still looking forward to the day I achieve it and will be proud of myself when I get there. In order to step up my training I’ve mapped out a 5k route for my run, as I was previously only covering about 3k whilst doing the Couch to 5k runs. I want to cover 5k with every run I do from now until I reach my goal, even though I may not run all of it, I want my body to know the distance and doing the same route will allow me to keep track of my progress, as opposed to just blindly running down whichever street looks like it goes down-hill…. In fact, I’ve deliberately made my course difficult in some places, with one killer hill near the end that I can’t even get halfway up at the moment!

The week ahead will present some different challenges for me, as I’m taking on quite a bit of overtime at work. I’m doing a couple of 13 hour shifts and a couple of 8 hour shifts, which turn to 16 hours and 11 hours with the 3 hour round-trip commute I have to take, meaning there will be very little time in my day for exercise, let alone gaming. I really can’t see myself picking up a control-pad until at least Friday, when I am doing a slightly shorter day…  This sucks.

Gaming provides a kind of mental stimulation you really can’t get anywhere else and allows you to truly escape for a few hours. Not that I’m saying I hate my life or anything, but I think we all need a break sometimes and games, for me, provide escapism in the most purest sense. Well, not as much as heroin would, I imagine, but it’s still pretty satisfying.   Films, for example, allow you to escape and to see a new world and perhaps a new point of view. You learn about new characters as they unravel in front of you and bare their soul.  With games, however, they allow you to step into a world and actually participate and change the world around you. You lend a part of yourself to every game you play and invest much more than you do whilst watching a film. You not only learn about new characters and points-of-view, you can sometimes learn things about yourself, about how you would react in certain situations that you would never usually come across in day-to-day life.  I need these experiences in my life. I crave the stimulation you get from playing a game and I’m going to miss out for yet another week…

My exercise will not suffer though, because I must keep my short-term priorities in check and continue to run. I am determined to stick to my Monday, Wednesday and Friday runs this week. It is Week 5 of the program and it looks like it’s going to step up the pace in a big way and I need to be 100% focused. I must force myself to get proper sleep each night and eat well and not get lazy with meals. I’m already failing at the sleeping part tonight as I’m staying up later to type this bullshit up. But I must not let any excuses creep into my mind, no matter how easy it’ll be next week, when I’m spending an ungodly amount of time dealing with angry customers and staring at a computer screen…

There is one advantage to all these hours at work – my food intake. I tend to not really think about food much at work, not as much as when I’m at home with a full cupboard and a full fridge to tempt me…  I also find that I can pack quite a healthy lunch and plan all my meals before I set out, meaning I’m less likely to impulse buy a 6 pack of Cornish pasties and ram them down my throat… Plus I’m broke anyway, so it’s packed lunches all the way this week! Wahey!

Wish me luck for the week ahead, readers, and I shall return next week, when I will be stronger, faster and fitter in body but probably malnourished and broken in mind…

Fat Gamer: Chapter One

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A couple of weeks ago The Sun ran a story on their front page claiming that gaming had killed a 20 year old man. The article was a little less shocking but it’s still one of those headlines that make anyone who plays games grumble. Now, the guy suffered from DVT from spending up to 12 hours playing games, sitting in the same position. I’m not sure I’ve spent THAT long playing games in one session, but if I had the time to I wouldn’t put it past me, so it’s certainly a scary story, but it’s not exactly common and definitely not the norm for “gamers”.

Whenever someone makes an ignorant comment disregarding “gamers” and assuming that they are simply fat losers who just sit in their bedroom of their parents’ house, not socialising and playing games for hours on end, I always want to stand up and argue with them that “gamers” have changed and evolved and aren’t anything like their warped mind thinks we are. Firstly, nearly everyone, in some form or another is a so-called “gamer” – Smartphones, Facebook games and the Wii have given the masses a chance to join in the fun without jumping in at the deep end. Gamers come in all shapes and sizes, many of them intelligent and a lot healthier and fitter than non-gamers, in fact.

However, whenever I want to stand up and defend us gamers I stumble at the first hurdle… Literally. I struggle to stand from my sweat-drenched office chair and if I do manage it, I’m so out of breath and exhausted by the effort required to haul my meat-sack off my arse I am more likely to vomit bacon-flavoured bile over them than I am to spew an intelligent argument in their stupid faces.

I may be exaggerating my weight issues a little for dramatic effect, but I’m a pretty hefty fella, and I have to admit that it’s partly down to gaming that I ended up this way. Years of gawping at a flickering screen, playing through nearly two decades worth of games and experiencing instant gratification for performing meaningless in-game tasks meant I was trained to expect fast results for minimal effort and therefore saw exercise as mostly gruelling and unrewarding.

It’s a tough admission to make, because I love games and I do know people who manage to live a healthy lifestyle and still manage to be hardcore gamers. Unfortunately I’m not one of them.

I’m going to change that.

As some of you may have heard on The Lonely Wizards podcast, I’ve been having problems with internet getting installed in my new flat, meaning my Xbox has been unplugged for about a month now and apart from a couple of very short sessions of Backbreaker: Vengeance, I’ve not really played it at all. As you can imagine this has thrown my whole routine off and caused me to look elsewhere to fill the void. I’ve started exercising… again. I say again because every so often I think to myself “enough is enough… I really need to start losing weight” and then for a few weeks I start to work out, count calories and try to get healthier… Needless to say, it always fails, but this time seems different.

I’ve started the couch to 5k program, which I would recommend to anyone looking to start running on a regular basis, because it’s a very clever system with an easy difficulty curve and it does actually work. I won’t go into much detail, but I wanted to talk about why this program works for me, as a gamer. The program starts you off very slowly and for the first week you only actually run for about 9 minutes per session, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re new to running it’s just enough to make you feel like you’ve accomplished something and the app that I use really makes you feel like you’ve achieved something too. The program builds up over a period of 6 weeks until you are running for 30 minutes straight, with no break. My eventual goal is to be able to cover 5k in 30 minutes, which I’m hoping to achieve by the end of September.

Along with this there are now a multitude of apps and websites that can help you keep track of your fitness goals using just your smartphone. This really helps appeal to my nerdy side and also my insecure side that needs constant reassurance that I’m doing well at something and to keep doing it. My favourite of these apps is the Runkeeper app, which uses GPS to keep track of you as you run and if you choose to, posts it to Facebook after every run. I’m very aware that I probably annoy the majority of my Facebook friends with my constant running updates, but for me I like to put everything out there for judgement. It keeps me on my toes and it makes me want to succeed and do well. If I start to slip I hope to receive a barrage of comments and insults to get my arse back into gear.

Another fantastic app is a calorie counter from MyFitnessPal.com. You can access it via the website, but it works much better on the go and you can also scan barcodes to add items using your smartphones built-in camera. When you first sign up you enter your weight and then a target weight and it calculates how many calories you should be eating to achieve this. You can also add exercise to this but I found this to be a bit inaccurate, so I just use it for food and any calories burnt during exercise is a bonus!

There are a couple of other exercise-specific apps that are for push-ups and one for ab workouts that I also found pretty helpful. Both of them pretty straight-forward really…

100 Push-ups

Ab Workouts

Anyway, I think you get my point; I like to exercise not just because it makes me feel good, but also because I can track my progress, improve my stats and “level-up” using a wide-range of tools, making exercise almost like a video game! I would like to say that video games can now help you keep fit with the various different motion controlled games you can now get, but I really don’t think any of these are viable as a substitute for exercising the good-ol’ fashioned way. Not yet anyway…

Let’s get back to the point of this article shall we? Gamers aren’t all unfit, unhealthy and overweight… Sure, some of them are, (myself included) but some non-gamers are too! My main gripe with this whole issue is the way gamers all get lumped in together and branded as the same thing, but in order to win this argument; I need to be coming from a better position. A slimmer, healthier, position, otherwise I’m making the whole situation worse by just looking like a fat nerd. This is why I am making it my goal to get fit, get healthy and get gaming! I will hold my controller in one hand and my dumbbell in the other and fight for truth in this dishonest world … Metaphorically. This wouldn’t work literally, of course.

This is just the beginning, ladies and gents, as I plan to bring you updates from the front line as I wage my war on ignorance… In the meantime, you should check out CVGs own W.R.O.N.G. campaign for more examples of utter, utter ignorance towards the gaming world…

Please also check out this inspiring fitness blog from The Urban Spartan (he’s my Pa!)