And then I got on. I don't like weighing myself --- even in the obscured form of body-mass index that it reports --- in front of my parents (or anyone), but I also know there's no chasing them out of the living room. And I knew that with such a weird Saturday my weight probably wouldn't have maintained its steady drop. The digits on it started rolling up and ... stopped way below my weight. If you believed it, I weighed about five pounds less than I did the evening before, beating even my record weight loss from wandering all over Manhattan for the Late Night With Conan O'Brien finale.
Weighing myself again after exercising --- no sense taking the day off when I've got such good momentum going --- found that over the course of an hour's mix of yoga, weight training, aerobic, and balance exercises I had gained 2.9 pounds. That was somehow a much more credible net weight loss than the initial drop implied. But the WiiFit lets you set goals for weight loss (and chides you if you beat the goals that you should focus on long-term health rather than short-term goals, now set a new short-term goal), and I set mine to try to hold what was surely an anomalously low reading --- I think the balance board was spread across two separate pieces of the rubber mat underneath the area rug and this messed up its idea of what gravity is --- even though I knew that wouldn't be realistically possible. To get to it I'd have to lose about two and a half pounds per week for two weeks, on the high side of what can be realistically lost. But surely it's good to have some impossible goals now and then, right?
Certainly the attempt seemed worthwhile and it only encouraged me to do more hourlong rather than half-hour sessions in the attempt to meet it. So I think I ended up making good use of a fluke, and now I know roughly how to position the WiiFit if I ever need to drop five pounds in a hurry.
Trivia: The average Japanese household spent 68 percent of its income on food in 1946. Source: A Modern History of Japan, Andrew Gordon.
Currently Reading: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.