“I want adipex, and I refuse to exercise” – how about Develop a weight loss plan with the Kinect

can the right incentive shed the pounds (for good)?
Just Dance 3 (for XBOX360)

I am sure people already have some fangled setup using the kinect to lose weight, but I wonder if we can actually entice patients to lose weight more effectively using video games. They are more fun, and would more likely keep attentions spans longer.

Games like Dance Central and Just Dance are very exhausting, yet still fun. Other cool thing is your progress is tracked, and I think you should be able to share the progress online via the XBox Live.  I am pondering if we can do a study that would have people play the kinect consistently every day for about 30 minutes a day, and eat a healthy diet. Maybe there would be more compliance and success with weightloss. You might think, “duh, if you exercise and eat right you will lose weight.” That is a no brainer, but the hardest part about doing that is… doing it. I’ve tried many times to finish P90X, but it just gets kinda of boring. It’s a great workout and I have no doubt if I stuck with it every day, I’d have

"X ME!"

Abs like Thanh Nguyen. Also if I had no obligation every day, I would definitely not mind spending 90minutes a day with Tony Horton and him telling me to “x” him.

Then again, playing the Xbox might not be enough motivation to keep on an exercise program. That too can still get boring. I guess it’s all about motivation. There was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] titled “Financial Incentive–Based Approaches for Weight Loss”

They were trying to see if people would have more compliance/success with weight loss if there was a monetary incentive/benefit. Their conclusion:

The use of economic incentives produced significant weight loss during the 16 weeks of intervention that was not fully sustained. The longer-term use of incentives should be evaluated.

Employees of Ohiohealth who have the employee health insurance are able to enroll in this “Health Miles Program”. You get this pedometer and you can get money back if you log a certain amount of steps/activity every day throughout the year. You can get up to 500$. There is no cost for you to enroll either. Now you would think this is a great incentive to stay active, but I never made it to the $500. Some days I was too busy to wear it, and there were many days that I was still just too lazy to stay active. Another drawback is people cheat, I have see many people [at least when it first started] that sit there on the hospital floor and just shake the pedometer in their hand…. yah. anyway.

Maybe my friend, we’ll call him Qi, has the right idea, and compete with your friends in “the biggest loser” contests, where you win something for losing the most weight. Then again, the goal should be to be healthy and lose weight, not get fat as you can and then crash diet to win the contest.

Then again we have the people who see me for the first time and want to talk about weight loss.  They tell me “I don’t eat anything” and “never lose weight”, and ask me to prescribe Adipex (weight loss pill, stimulant, more or less not good for you). I usually ask them to keep a food diary/activity log so they can visualize how much they “are not eating” or rather ARE eating. Of course, I would say 99% of the people don’t follow through, or don’t come back. Endocrine disorders aside, it’s really simple math. Calories in minus calories out. If you get a positive number, you are taking in too much or not using enough. If you get a negative number, then you really should be on your way to shedding weight, (or you are logging your cals wrong).

I am not a big fan of diet pills because of the dangerous side effects. I wouldn’t want my patient’s heart to explode because they were too rev’d up from the diet pills. I mean there is a place (I suppose) for the use of these medications, but if you are not going to make an effort at watching what you eat and try to exercise… a diet pill is not going to do it for you. It’s the same for the bariatric surgeries, some people expect the surgery to do all the work. They don’t change their life style, and they end up gaining their weight back.

Well, I think I got a little side track with this post. Maybe I will see if MommyMD will give me some stimulants so I can lose weight too, and forget about this P90X and Tony Horton can just X himself. (I jest).

Microsoft Kinect – or Cant Kinect out of box

 

Kinect

Over the black friday holiday, I figured it would be a great time to pick up a Microsoft Kinect. They were having sales for $199 for the kinect bundles at multiple places. After waking up extra early and missing the line to pick one up in store, I also missed an opportunity to buy one from amazon.com. Feeling dejected, I checked out eBay, and was able to buy one from ToysRUs Ebay store for $199. no shipping, just tax. I felt silly waking up early. I promised myself no more waiting in line during black friday for deals that you could likely find online.

Eitherway,  I wanted to get a Kinect, beause I figured my sig other might actually like playing it. When I bought our Wii, I thought the same. Wrong. I think I got her to play with it 2x. I bought a PS3 Move last Turkey day thinking the same thing. Wrong. She refused to play it. (Has yet to touch it). With the kinect/dancing game, I was certain she would want to play, and so far so good.

Well the point of thise post is to review my setup, and to review the system overall.

With either the Wii, PS3, or Xbox, the motion gaming requires a sensor that sits near the screen. At least for the Wii they have wireless options. The PS3 eye Toy and Xbox Kinect require more information to be transferred and must be connected with a cord. If your system is next to the screen/tv this is not an issue, but for those who use a projector and have the system much farther away this is an issue.

When I bought the Kinect bundle, I was not aware of the “kinect ready” xbox vs the older ones. The Kinect sensor uses a proprietary powered usb port. The older Xboxes do not have the proprietary port, only USB ports. Problem with the regular USB ports is that they do not provide enough power to run the Kinect sensor. When you buy the kinect by itself it comes with a pigtail adapter that has a seperate power adapter and adapter for a typical usb a port. This allows the sensor to be plugged into USB port, while being powered with the power supply.

Kinect Pigtail Adapter

With this option I was able to use a usb extension cable from MonoPrice.com to extend the length and use my kinect with my projector.

USB Extension for Xbox Kinect or PS3 Eye

I also used the same USB extension cord for my PS3 Eye toy, and it works great now with no more degradation of signals and cutting out.  Even though it is the same cord they have a separate item on the monoprice site