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Dance Dance Revolution Exercise Study 122

Posted by Zonk from the shake-your-groove-thing dept.
krf writes "Gamasutra reports that researchers in West Virgina are doing a study on using DDR to fight childhood obesity." From the article: "The study, which is currently budgeted at $60,000, provides each of the selected 85 child participants with a game system, copy of the game, and dance pad."
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Dance Dance Revolution Exercise Study More

Dance Dance Revolution Exercise Study

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  • McDonalds (Score:1, Troll)

    by rbarreira ( 836272 )
    Perhaps you american guys should focus on eating less garbage like McDonalds...

    • Re:McDonalds (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ZosX ( 517789 ) <zosxavius@gmQUOTEail.com minus punct> on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:18PM (#12172239) Homepage
      Perhaps you american guys should focus on eating less garbage like McDonalds...

      I know this was modded as a troll (and it really is), but troll or not, it is true. Americans are some of the fattest people on the planet. Just go to a Walmart and take a rough percentage. Around here in fatland Pittsburgh, I usually average about 40-50% of people being overweight. Convieniently for them the local Walmarts all have McDonalds so they can fatten up after buying cheap crap that was made in china all the while being surrounded by the american flag. Remember, the Walmart logo is a bastardization of the flag with the red, white, and blue and the stars. Isn't the free market grand?

      For the record, something like 1 in 5 or 2 in 5 kids are obese in the United States. Don't have the actual statistic, but it is somewhere between 20 and 25% if not worse already. The generations seem to increase in fat percentages.

      Also, I used to be fat myself. I weight about 170 lbs on a good day and when I graduated high school I weighed 250 lbs. It took a good year to lose the weight, but after I did, I swore off ever eating at places like McDonalds. I'm now vegetarian (can't give up cheese), and I am probably 100x healthier than I would have been had I stayed with the heart attack diet.

      You are what you eat.

      • Re:McDonalds (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rbarreira ( 836272 )
        It wasn't intended as a troll, it was intended as advice. Unless you want your children to be more and more unhealthy, you should put McDonalds where it deserves to be...
      • I found that the best way to keep myself from getting fat from junk food is to not buy junk food. That way, if I find myself hungry at midnight, I'll just have to eat a damn apple or something. Also, the trick to not buying junk food is to always go to the grocery store with a full stomach.
      • Man, I turned vegetarian almost 2 years ago, and it really does help keep your weight down.
        I'm a sandwichhollic, and if you look at the fat content in a sandwich, it's all in the mayonaise, the cheese, and the meat.
        Cut those out and you still have a mighty fine sandwich, and you cut out all the excess fat, while still filling up on the veggies.
        I still stick a piece of cheese in though ;D

      • Re:McDonalds - math is fun (Score:4, Funny)

        by LordEd ( 840443 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @01:57AM (#12173434)
        Consider the following...

        A single pack of large fries contains 17.5g of fat. If we assume a store will sell 100 packs of large fries, that is 1750g, or 3.85 lbs of fat.

        In 1 week, the store puts out 27 lbs of fat.
        In 1 year, the store puts out 1404 lbs of fat.

        There are over 12,000 mcdonads in the US

        Assuming each store sells an average 100 packs of large fries, 12,000 mcdonalds stores put out 16,848,000 lbs of fat.

        Assuming the same number of sales in big macs (21.5g). That translates to 20,660,640 lbs of fat in 1 year.

        I can have a decent sized sandwich with cheese at about the 10g range. Replacing a burger/fry lunch with that would be only 9,609,600 lbs of fat, or a savings of 27,899,040 lbs of fat from being eaten.

        Its almost sickening thinking about it.

      • Have you ever tried to eat healthy? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @04:10AM (#12173922)
        I am right now, and it's hard. I don't mean like, "I really want a cheeseburger" hard, I mean like, how the hell do I avoid trans-fats (i.e. Hydrogenated Oils)? How the heck do I afford 5 servings of fresh vegetables/day if I don't have the time to prepare bulk and I can't afford the premade stuff. Americans aren't fat for just any old reason. We really are getting the stuff cramed down are throats. Junk food's not just cheaper, it's more profitable. Food made with Hydrogenated Oils costs a fraction to make than with butter or traditional oils, and lasts up to 18 times longer on the shelf.

        I'm an out of work computer tech, and my budgets gone to hell. I can eat fast food for $20/week. No matter how I run the numbers, I can't eat truely healthy for less than $100/week. This assumes I cook everything myself. Remember, eating healthier isn't just more expensive per meal, it means eating more and more often. 2 Big Macs'll get you through the day, if only digesting the fat calories. That doesn't work with fish and vegetables.

        I'm not saying we're blameless. Part of the problem is all the fat asses out there eat the junk. Economies of scale and what not. But once again take hydrogenated oils. What do you suppose are the odds, given the enormous profitability they represent, of Americans getting clued in on just how bad they are for you?

        Anyway, yeah, we're a bunch of fat bastards. But it's not as easy to stop being a fat bastard in America as you think.
        • No need to eat perfectly healthy food; just cook some of it yourself. A nice, big pasta meal with cheese sauce costs only a few dollars, yet can feed four in one sitting (or one for a day).

          I dunno where you are that you can eat McDonald's for $20/wk. I can eat Wendy's for about that, though. But sandwiches and other things I made myself are even easier on my budget. You just don't want to overindulge and snack yourself (or at least your money) to death.

        • I can eat fast food for $20/week. No matter how I run the numbers, I can't eat truely healthy for less than $100/week.

          Your kidding right? My food budget is about $50-$60 per week, and it could probably be less if I cooked more from scratch (I do cook most of my own food, but there are usually a few shortcuts compared to completely from scratch). I eat a lot of salads, which are healthy and not expensive. I eat more chicken than beef, which is both a bit healthier and fairly inexpensive.

          Maybe that's not tha

          • I pulled it off. After I finished with uni and did not have a real job yet, I got by on 4 'servings' of TacoBell a day. A serving was one of bean burrito, soft taco, or hard taco. I believe that back then the prices were some combination of 49, 59, and 69 cents each for those items. I also bought really cheap three liter bottles of cola, Shasta if I remember correctly, at I think 59 cents back then. With the right amount of free water and sneaking free food and soft drinks from faculty talks and the like I
        • Eat the burger, skip the fizzy sugar water AND if possible skip the fries?

          My bet is the sugar water + fries is the really unhealthy part. Sure you might need to add another burger in order to feel satisfied, but that'll be at most 40/week, and it should be healthier.

          Sure the bread is refined flour, but in comparison fries = starch+fat, and cola = tons of sugar in solution. And somehow it doesn't make you feel like munching and munching unlike fries (and the sugar drinks aren't really effective at quenchin
        • As other sibling posters have pointed out, you can eat fairly well and healthy for cheap. I used to make a pot of spaghetti sauce (4 qts) once a week, and eat pasta for dinner all week. It's very cheap, and very good. I even did meatballs (these days I used turkey) that are about half breadcrumb by volume, with an egg to hold it together. Pasta is really cheap, and a pot of sauce is cheap to make and lasts a week.

          Even ramen can be part of a healthy diet-- I just took a look at a packet, and it's about
        • Switch to wendys. The chili isn't that bad for you, they have salads for fairly cheap, and they have non deep fried chicken sandwiches.

          It's still fast food, but better on you then 2 big macs.

      • Re:McDonalds (Score:4, Funny)

        by Wooky_linuxer ( 685371 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @08:58AM (#12174978)
        Dood, you americans are so fat because you insist on using that old imperial system. Weight yourself in IS units and you'll be all lighter faster than you can say "kilogram". An example? You say you weight 170 lbs, if you were using kg you'd be weighting only 77! ;)
      • I think the problem is likely deeper than eating habits and is really a deep-rooted lack of self-control. The American culture seems to be falling into a vicious cycle of self-indulgence. The more you get, the more you want, whether it's food, television, larger vehicles, you name it. (I am an American, by the way, so I'm ciritquing from the inside)
  • From TFA:

    "Obesity claims last year cost us $77 million. We have to curtail those costs."

    It's just lovely how the insurance industry is more concerned with making money than they are with the physical welfare of children.

    • Re:Greedy pigs. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yes but mcdonalds makes billions, we should offset the cost of insurance by taking part of mcdonalds profits so they don't have to suffer so.
    • If a company's first priority wasn't making money, then its other priorities would be irrelevant, because the company would go bankrupt and cease to exist.

      Like it or not, money is what drives the world, and everyone who wants to have any effect on the world needs money to do it.
      • That is not true. A company does not need to make money to stay in business, as long as they are not losing it either.
        • Although, unless the company has zero expendetures(sp?), the same processes and ideas apply in order to break even and turn a profit.

          Unless, of course, it's a scam that's made to be run into the ground, or a front for cooking books and diverting cashflow. Then it's a success even if it loses.

          (Aaaand... Cue the real economist/accountant/businessperson to hand me my rhetorical ass...)
      • If a company's first priority wasn't making money, then its other priorities would be irrelevant, because the company would go bankrupt and cease to exist.

        From the society's point of view, if the company does more damage to the society than it provides benefit, then it might be necessary for the society to make SURE that the company ceases to exist.

    • Re:Greedy pigs. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Temporal ( 96070 )
      Dude... That's the whole point of capitalism. It's working as designed.

      Are you concerned about the physical welfare of children? How much money have you spent trying to improve it?
      • Are you concerned about the physical welfare of children? How much money have you spent trying to improve it?

        Do you mean that no-one spends money to improve the physical welfare of kids? Starting with parents who make an effort in giving them good food, and ending in many other places...
        • I'm saying that it's unreasonable to call random third parties greedy for not wanting to help obese kids simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Parents are not random third parties.
      • Just because something is working as designed doesn't mean it's working toward the welfare of the population.

        From a purely capitalist perspective, a night at home with my family is practically useless. Much better for me to forget them and work late ($) and then drive ($) to a bar, get drunk ($$), go pick up a hooker ($$$), and start driving to a hotel, but hit another car on the way, killing the hooker ($$$), and putting a family of four in the emergency room ($$$$$$$), and a few of them in the ICU ($$$$

        • Re:Greedy pigs. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @01:08AM (#12173221) Journal
          With all due respect, that's not capitalism. Everything you did after hitting the other car suffers from the "broken window fallacy" (google it) and did not benefit the economy; on the whole you did great damage, and capitalism did what it could to minimize that damage.

          Under capitalism, you destroyed (most likely) two cars, took a human life (and yes, even under capitalism that's a bad thing; you have prevented that human from ever producing value of any kind whatsoever), and consumed many, many resources put to better use than medical care. (Again, see "broken window fallacy".)

          Capitalism minimizes that damage by trying to efficiently utilize resources to the repair, although the medical system is pretty broken in that regard right now.

          If you're going to hate it, make sure you understand what it is, not a caricature of it. I can't explain it in a Slashdot post, but for starters you need to understand the idea of capital; it isn't the primary component of the word for show. You destroyed a lot of capital, of all kinds, in your example, for no gain at all. Capitalism doesn't promote that.

          Capitalism has problems, but that is not where they lie.
        • I've read the rebuttal of the parent already, but I must say I enjoyed that post if nothing but for the creativity. =)
    • "It's just lovely how the insurance industry is more concerned with making money than they are with the physical welfare of children."
      Actually they are in concerned with the physical welfare of children because it cost them money. If you want to be upset about something save your venom for Coke, Pepsi, KFC, Burgerking, and McDonalds. They really fit the your statement.

  • Interesting Concept (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kyle90 ( 827345 )
    It's too bad though, that kids have to be enticed with video games in order to become active. Just go outside! It's like a video game, except with better graphics (and when you die, you really die).

    • Re:Interesting Concept (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      (and when you die, you really die)

      And that's a good thing? Besides; the story sucks, the gameplay is boring and repeditive, and the massively-multiplayer version is filled with griefers.
      • Man. That sounds like playing WoW but without the crappy servers.
    • I play DDR and bike (outside!) regularly. DDR is way more fun.

    • Re:Interesting Concept (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:49PM (#12172402) Homepage
      Kids have to be enticed with activities to become active. "Just go outside" was never about just going outside. It was about going down to the lake, building forts, catching frogs, seeing how far you could throw broken glass, spitting on passing cars, etc. But now "outside" is dangerous. "The lake is toxic." "The glass is dangerous." "That dirt will make you sick." "The drivers are going to run you over."

      We've raised a generation of kids terrified of going outside. Of course they don't know what to do when out there: nothing is safe. They don't go outside because there is nothing they can do out there.

      Ironically, dancing has also gotten a bad name in the past 20 years. While 100 years ago it was common to send your kids off to dance class, now dancing generally means drugs and hedonism and, well, fun things to protect your kids from.

      • Back in my day, my mother kicked us kids out of the house to get some "god damned peace and quite".

        So, the trick is for parents to have more than one child. Said children will fight over limited resources (television, Nintendo, Legos, etc.). At which point one or both parents will become pissed off. The children will then be kicked out of the house and left to their own devices. (In our case, it was playing baseball except with apples from a nearby tree. It was messy.)
      • The problem is a lack of open space, not a widespread neurosis. Suburban sprawl and track homes have overtaken most of the open space I played on as a kid, and the green slices of golf-like grass they set up as play areas are a poor substitute.
      • interesting...

        [earmarked]

    • Re:Interesting Concept (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nunchux ( 869574 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @12:30AM (#12172953)
      "Going outside" isn't always an option. It's been twelve years since I was a pre-teen, but I remember well growing up in a pretty typical suburban housing development. There was no nature to explore, only endless fenced-off bacyards. For that matter there was no open space to gather on to play football or soccer (the yards were also very small, the best we could do was play basketball on the driveway.) If you wanted to play a sport other than driveway basketball you had to do it at school or join a regulated soccer or softball league. We weren't allowed to ride bikes much further than a friend's house two or three streets over because we were surrounded by heavily trafficked streets (double or triple lanes with cars whizzing by at 45 mph.) The development had a pool and tennis courts, but minors had to be accompanied by an adult to use them.

      The "Leave it to Beaver" days are over and for kids in urban and heavily congested suburban areas "playing outside" isn't always an option. The popularity of video games isn't necessarily a cause of this-- I see it as a side effect instead. And if kids are going to while away the after school hours gathered around the Playstation, it would be nice if they got some exercise doing it.
    • "It's too bad though, that kids have to be enticed with video games in order to become active."

      Exercise the body, or exercise the mind. It's hard to do both.

  • More informative articles: (Score:3, Informative)

    by RotJ ( 771744 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:05PM (#12172153) Journal
    Perhaps the link should have pointed to the original AP article:
    http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=51 4&e=8&u=/ap/20050404/ap_on_he_me/fit_dancing_away_ obesity [yahoo.com]
    or
    http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/diet.fitness/04/04/ dancing.away.obesity.ap/index.html?section=cnn_lat est [cnn.com]

    instead of Gamasutra's brief synopsis.

    I love that kid's "tough guys wear pink" t-shirt, BTW. He's no wuss, like that StarWarsKid is.

    • FTA:

      "It's a lot of fun," Joyce Jones said. "But I can only do it about two times for every four times he does."

      Exactly how fat is she that her 250 lb son has twice the energy she does? Okay okay, maybe she's just old.

      In West Virginia, Robrietta Lambert, a physical education teacher at Franklin Elementary in Pendleton County, believes she already knows what all the studies will find. She has been using the video game in her classes since last fall.

      "It improves cardiovascular health as well as eye-han

    • What's up with that fat kid, K.D. Jones being in TWO articles on TWO different web pages (Yahoo! and CNN) with TWO different pictures of him? Instant celebrity?

      Either Konami hires this kid as their next spokesman for DDR or they lose an opportunity to reach out to other fat kids that wear shirts that say "only tough guys wear pink" and play DDR ...

  • One way to limit obesity is to cut back on entertainment, altogether. There are so many time sinks out there from TV to videogames to reading Slashdot, that dispensing with many of them is essential to getting by in life.

  • This could start a trend (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:15PM (#12172216)
    Exercise inspired by videogames. Imagine if they took FIFA Soccer for PS2 and made a real sport out of it! Could work? Sounds a lot more likely than someone turning EA's "ice hockey" game NHL-2005 into an actual pro sport that someone plays on real ice.
  • DDR requires activity. Movement. Exercise. It's well established that activity and exercise helps you be fit and lose weight. They may as well be doing a study to find out of push-ups help you keep fit or if people who play a lot of basketball tend to be in better shape and lose weight.

    I saw an article the other day where a chubby kid (I think he was 140lb or more at the age of 12) said that "I can play basketball better now that I've lost 10 pounds with this thing". Um... I don't follow. If you're playing
    • If you're playing basketball, aren't you already active?

      Not necessarily. It doesn't take a lot of effort to sorta jog after people and hope things happen. I played soccer on an intramural league, and saw plenty of people that managed to prevent actual calorie usage. And a few people that seemed to be pretty active, but it must've been only during the one game a week judging by their physique. If he's playing basketball for an hour every Saturday in a YMCA league, he might not be doing much.
      • And you can just shoot hoops in basketball, and not really run after the ball much. If you are actually playing games at the park, or wherever, regularly, and not just going to practice and shooting freethrows for half an hour, you will get skinny fast.

    • Re:Pointless. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:38PM (#12172335) Journal
      The problem is not figuring out what the kids need to do. They need to exercise. The problem is figuring out how to make them do it. Most exercise is boring, therefore kids don't do it. DDR is fun. Is it fun enough that your obese kid will actually play it enough to lose weight? Let's find out!
      • It's fun enough that a number of my friends use it as a fitness program.
      • Most exercise is boring, therefore kids don't do it.

        Gah! Most exercise is incredibly fun! The problem is that we've gone and transformed our perception of "exercise" from running around, jumping, dodging, throwing things, rolling around in the dirt and climbing trees into getting on a freakin' treadmill in a stuffy room and running in place for thirty minutes. Wheeeeee...

        Exercise is supposed to be incredibly fun. Somehow, though, we've managed to make it one of the most monotonous, sterile, and munda

      • DDR is fun if you've never done it before. After a while, kids lose interest. You need a whole long series of excercise oriented video games. Yeah, you could send the kid down to the nearest park to play soccer with his friends or something. On the other hand, if it were that easy, the kid wouldn't be a lardass to begin with. The video games provide an interactiveness and conveniance that might not otherwise be available. But like I said earlier, you need to have the next great thing ready for when DD
        • Actually, no. I have one of the shortest attention spans for exercise of anyone on the planet. My basement is a graveyard of sports equipment. A year ago I started doing DDR, and I'm as much of a fanatic as ever.

          I built a "studio" [exergaming.com] in a vacant office next to mine, so I can take a few dancing breaks during the day. I can't see getting sick of DDR any more that I might "get sick of" music itself.
      • Well, it worked for me.
        I started playing DDR a little over a year ago.
        I dropped from 230 to 200 in a year.
        DDR was the only thing I changed.
  • Sincerely, I hope this fight childhood obesity campaign turns into a genuine ddr craze, because I've been waiting for a 9th mix forever. Unfortunately, I have this looming fear that if and when another mix is finally released, it'll be some kind of sweatin' to the oldies from hell.

    Just remember, ddr is a cool game... PERIOD. It's not just a way to lose weight.

    • In The Groove (Score:3, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      because I've been waiting for a 9th mix forever.

      9th Mix is here [inthegroove.biz]. Contact your arcade operator, or buy the forthcoming version for PlayStation 2 (NTSC U/C) [inthegroovegame.com].

      Just remember, ddr is a cool game... PERIOD.

      More than a cool game, it is The legend. (period) [jk0.org]

      • Roxor did a really good job with this. I can't wait until the PS2 version. Combine with Cobalt Flux [cobaltflux.com] for extremely expensive but awesome experience.
      • If it were not a US only release it might be good, but I've given up trying to get any of the dancing games in australia because they never release any here. And I'm not going to get my ps2 modded just so I can import the US games. I've gone instead with stepmania on the pc and used a decent usb to ps2 controller. And I don't have to wait for the 9th mix of DDR as there is a scene thats creating new mixes for download. Or if I get inspired I can make up my own from songs of my choosing. I find it good

    • Re:DDR, Not Just a Cheap Diet Anymore! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      a ps2 version of in the groove is being developed, which should turn out to be good, if the arcade machine was any indicator
  • otherwise I doubt the kids will play enough for the study to get any sort of meaningful results.
  • obese child + no exercise = obese child
    obese child + no exercise + bad food = increasingly obese child

    so, start a healthy diet and you'll see improvement. On top of that please exercise regularly and you'll see dramatic improvement. What's a way to get non active kids raised on fast food and tv dinners back on track? Make exercise fun, make eating healthy food attractive.

    disclaimer: i might be wrong; not all obese kids are on a bad diet without exercise, some kids are born big.

  • Why just kids? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by jago25_98 ( 566531 )
    If you lived near me, there was a field closeby and I wanted a game of football, I bet you wouldn't.

    Nobody I know wants to do that anymore. They'd rather get drunk. Instead I have to go swimming, surfing and so on.
  • First things first: I still suck at DDR. Not as much as I used to, but yes, I got no riddim (sic).

    What I noticed in the process of going from inept to bad, is that when I first started playing I was jumping all over the place. However, after actually watching other folks play, I realized that better players try to minimize their movements...things like the now obvious "leave your feet on a pad after hitting it".

    Perhaps it's different as you actually progress into higher skill levels, but I'm wondering
    • Actually, better player=higher difficulty=more exercise. Try any song on Heavy. Trust me, you will mover more than you ever did on light ^_^
    • I was worried for a bit about this, then I moved to standard mode and woah boy. I actually think going from light to standard is too much of a difficulty increase!

      Before on beginner and light I could play for an hour or two before I needed to stop. I just started doing standard songs and I'm pretty much sweaty and out of breath after 5 songs. (Never been in good shape).

      On the beginner setting they give you a beat inbetween every step unless you are repeating the same arrow. This givs you time to step to t
    • Oh, don't worry. Once you get to songs on heavy, you'll get quite a workout.

      When they do the survey, they really should also track what difficulty the players are playing at and how good they're getting, because at low levels, it's not a very good workout unless you play for a really long time.
    • Watch someone play Max 3000.

      It's one of the hardest songs to beat (10 footer), and most people end up loosing just because they can't keep up with the steps :)

      To answer your question: the more efficent people get, the harder and more notes a song has. So even if you are super efficent, there's always a song with an insane number of steps that makes you gasp for breath.
    • I'm wondering if in general better players actually get less excercise than crappy players

      "It doesn't get any easier, you just go faster"- Greg Lemond, three time Tour de France winner.

      Most sports or exercise things are like that-- as you get better, you get more efficient so that things that were hard before are easy and take very little energy. The catch is that you do harder and harder things, often without realizing it. When you first start out with anything, you end up totally thrashed after an ho
  • DDR was the sole reason why I bought my PS2. I do have a few other games (Mercenaries, Time Splitters 3...) but DDR is what keeps my PS2 from getting dusty. DDR would also sit on my Top 3 favorite games list, right up there with Nethack and Goldeneye64.

  • Loosing Weight with DDR (Score:5, Informative)

    by tepp ( 131345 ) on Friday April 08, 2005 @02:52PM (#12178836)
    Well, I must confess I'm trying to loose weight with DDR myself. I'm doing Ultramix 2 at the moment. 1 hour a day, 5 days a week. I'm up to getting A's on 4 feet dances, passing some 5 feets (the hardness of a song in DDR is measured in feets, 1 feet being easy, 10 being suicide). My main goal is more on getting A's than passin harder songs, as I find I get better faster by practicing my techniques.

    I've had a yo-yo problem with diets for the past four years. I've lost 30 pounds, put 10 back on, lost 5, put 10 back on... now I'm at 160 (175 was my max). I really want to be 140. Actually, what I really want is to wear size 10 jeans. Currently I wear size 12's. I'm female, 5'5". Yes, I'm fat, you don't have to tell me. But at least I'm trying.

    I've done many different diets. I eat healthy. I don't ever eat at McDonalds or Burger King. I eat small portions of meat, low-fat frozen yogurt, no candy or chips. I usually stay under 1500 calories a day, 2000 max when I'm being bad. But my metabolism is very slow. I can only drop weight through dieting by going down to 1200 calories a day, then I get dizzy and start fainting. I've done atkins - twice. I lost weight but couldn't keep it off. My best dieting system was the Hacker's Diet, using my palm pc to count calories.

    I've had gym memberships. I hate doing cardio on the exercize bikes or on the treadmills. It's so dull. After 5 minutes I'm so bored, that I give up. You can't read while running on a treadmill, and the TV in the gym has no sound. I love to walk outside, but in Seattle, it rains most of the time so I can't walk every day. When I do walk, I walk 3 miles or more.

    DDR is something I can do every day, rain or shine. My xbox and my dance pad are always waiting for me. I've been dancing for 2 weeks, and my husband has noticed how toned my legs have gotten! I haven't weighed in this week, but my jeans are getting looser and my butt is firmer. I'm also getting much better at all the jumps and fast steps on DDR. A week ago I couldn't get higher than a D on any song. Last night I got my first A on a 4 feet song, then immediately got another A on another 4 footer. Sweet.

    DDR really is a workout. Your heart races, you sweat buckets. But you don't want to quit, because you were SO CLOSE to getting through that song with no Boo's. You ALMOST HAD IT - ONE MORE TRY! So you go back on and do that song again, and again, and again, because it's addictive. But at least this sort of addiction has me exercising rather than just slaying virtual dragons.

    I play DDR with a big glass of water next to me. I drink all of it during my workout. I have a timer that lets me know when an hour has passed, so I don't cheat, but usually I play a few more songs after it goes off as I was SO CLOSE to beating "In your eyes", or some other song.

    Anyway, I wouldn't say DDR is for everyone. But for those who are saying "go outside" - in Seattle, it's rainy and cold and windy. For those saying "it's a video game - it's not exercise", I dare you to try and get a high score without making your heart thud in your chest. You find yourself bouncing, hopping, jumping, leaping from square to square trying to get your timing just right. It's a better workout than yoga - it's as fast paced as the Step class I took once. Nearly as hard as the spinning class I did last year. And I am having lots of fun.

    My only gripe is my pad is dying. It's a cheap softmat, I'm going to have to invest in an ignition pad soon. :( Since I play on the XBOX, I can't get a cobalt flux, and I've been hearing bad things about the ignition pads and XBOX support. :(
    • DDR is a great way to lose weight! I lost about 50 lbs so far.

      I found the pad makes a HUGE difference. I play Stepmania with a Cobalt Flux on a hardwood floor. That is pretty much the ultimate in responsiveness. I tried playing with a friends soft pad on carpet... it was absolutely horrible.

      A better pad = higher scores = less frustration = more fun = more playing = losing more pounds!!!

      My advice. Buy a Red Octane Ignition pad at EB Games and buy the insurance on the pad. If you are not on a hardwood floo
    • Get a cobalt flux pad ($300 apiece, about) and try some harder songs. I found I get better faster if I focus more on playing songs that are hard for me (B or C material) but not absolutely impossible (huge stretches where I stop and stare at the screen with my mouth hanging open.)

      I play way fewer hours a week average than you, and I get As on some 7 and 8 feet dances. But I'd never have done that if I was focussing on the AA on 4 feet dances.
    • Get stepmaina from sourceforge.com, go to levelsix.com and get the DDR Deluxe Dance Mat V.3.1 (PC/USB). It's under fifty bucks and works really well. (i've used the 3.1 pad for playstation and used an adapter) You will have to download some songs, but its really easy.
  • How the HELL is a pedometer going to measure how many steps I take when my upper body hardly moves at all, and if my pelvis is moving, it's twisting, not vertical? I'd think I'd be doing about five times as many steps as it'd be measuring, unless they strap it to my ankle, in which case the thing will break first song I do.

    I can do some 7- and 8-feet songs -- that means it's been assigned a difficulty of eight out of ten.

    If they want to know how many steps and which songs we were doing -- and scores and

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