Common knowledge suggests that playing too many videogames will cause you to get fat and be unhealthy. In reality it all depends on your mental attitude. I'm going to show you here how the Sony Playstation 3 helped me to lose weight; a lot of it. That's right - videogames helped me lose weight. Welcome to what I call the PS3 diet.
In the spring of 2009, I finally decided it was time to do something about my weight after a series of holiday photos showed me in a very poor light. I'm 6ft 2in (1.87m) tall and at the time I weighed in at 272lbs (123kg). I wasn't morbidly obese, and my height disguised the weight fairly well, but nevertheless I was b-i-g. I've never been a big fan of fad diets - they don't work and are just a way for celebrity publicity whores to get more airtime. So I decided to figure it out for myself.
What does work, of course, is the age-old mantra - diet and exercise. Less in, more out, and you'll lose weight. I'm lazy by nature so the thought of joining a gym or coming up with some sort of regimented exercise plan was simply out of the question. I needed something more manageable - something I would actually do and stick to.
The plan was pretty simple in my case - cut down radically on what I was eating. Not a starvation diet because those don't work either, plus they do more damage than good. No - I needed to figure out how best to cut the calories without it seeming like I was dieting.
I work in an office so I spent 10 hours a day piloting a desk, and we always eat lunch out because despite having over 400 employees in this location, we have no cafeteria. Eating out normally means fast food. Not necessarily the big-chain burger joints, but everything from sub sandwiches to Chinese lunches. It's not the ideal way to get your daily feed but you can work with it if you try.
So why 'the PS3 diet'? Read on and find out.