The fat reality of gaming is that we spend a lot of time sitting on our asses. With the exception of burning calories while rocking out on Rock Band, serving people on DDR, and gesticulating wildly for certain Wii games, there’s a lot of sitting and staring. Trash talking and frustrated controller throwing are probably the best workouts we get while playing the traditional stationary games.

To make matters worse, junk food is as much a part of the ‘typical gamer’ stereotype as is pasty, sun-deprived skin. It’s safe to assume that potato chip grease is one of the top 3 reasons why Nintendo put wrist-straps on the Wiimote. I’ve known fellow gamers to live on nothing but Skittles, Pringles, Red Bull, and Hot Pockets, and I’m not sure if this is purely because they don’t want to take time away from their games to spend more than 2 minutes preparing food, if they’re on a tight budget, or if they just don’t know any better.

I’m a bit of a health nut for some of the normal health nut reasons (ie. I like being relatively fit and I don’t want to get cancer and die early just so I could fill my body with artificial flavors and preservatives). But the #1 reason why I advocate eating well and getting some exercise is because when you exercise a little and put GOOD things in your body, you feel GOOD. It’s an amazingly simple, beautiful, symmetrical equation. Eat well = feel well. Eat crap = feel crap. Same goes for exercise. If you act like a blob, you’ll feel lethargic and heavy like a blob. If you make yourself active and energetic a little bit each day, you will start to feel active and energetic.

Of course, it’s easier to say than to do, but I have some personal tips that help make the doing almost as easy as the saying.

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Little eating habits that make a big difference:

1) AVOID PROCESSED SUGAR! Soda is definitely the biggest culprit. I’ve known some people to do nothing more than cut out the sugary sodas and they lose 10 lbs of couch potato flab in just a few weeks. Candy is another naughty source of empty sugar calories, so avoid it when you can.

Note about sugar: I have a major sweet-tooth so I know how hard this can be, but I’ve found ways to still get some sweet and not suffer as much for it. Good alternatives include fruit and natural fruit juice (with no sugar added), and baked goods without regular white sugar. For example, Trader Joe’s has these amazing granola and dried cherry cookies sweetened with molasses, evaporated cane juice, and brown rice syrup, all of which are better for you than white sugar. And these cookies are seriously delicious. I would have eaten them as a kid and that’s saying something.

2) AVOID PROCESSED CARBOHYDRATES! White flour is bad, whole wheat flour and whole grains are really good. Don’t eat things like white bread and frosted flakes. Instead, eat whole grain bread, granola and whole grain Cheerios. Not only does it help you drop pounds, you get a lot more energy and nutrients from the whole grains.

3) AVOID DEEP-FRIED FOODS! This is a bit of a no-brainer. Deep-fried foods are full of fat and usually empty carbohydrates. Icky.

4) EAT SMALLER PORTIONS, but EAT MORE OFTEN! These are two habits that should go together. When you eat a meal, try to make it small enough that it satisfies your hunger but doesn’t make you feel full. Then in 3-4 hours when you feel hungry again, eat some more. Having 5 smallish meals and snacks each day instead of having 3 (or, more typically, 2) big meals a day helps speed up your metabolism to process and burn calories more quickly. Think about it this way: Sumo wrestlers fatten themselves up by eating only one HUGE meal a day and then going to sleep right afterwards.

In order to not look like a sumo wrestler, I advise doing the exact opposite: eat lots of small meals and…

5) DON’T EAT RIGHT BEFORE BED! Give yourself at least 2 hours to digest and let your body channel the food to muscles and organs. If you eat and sleep soon after, your body will store the energy as fat.

Easy ways to exercise:

1) DON’T TAKE SHORTCUTS FOR STUFF THAT’S ALREADY EASY! Best example: take the stairs instead of the elevator. 4 floors it might take you an extra 30 seconds and you’ll get a nice little workout from it. If you have to go up more than 5 floors, it might make the most sense to take an elevator most of the way, but you can still climb a few of them and then hop on the elevator.

2) TAKE THE 5 MINUTE WALK! If something is only a 5 minute walk away, walk it, don’t resort to something lazy like a cab or bus or subway.

3) DO RANDOM, EASY EXERCISES THROUGHOUT THE DAY! It can look kind of silly, but I like to walk around on my toes and do calf-raises when walking around an office or while at home. I also like to periodically flex my abs hard and hold it for 30 seconds while I’m sitting at my desk, on the couch, or in a car. These are small things that can make a difference.

4) STRETCH! Stretching actually burns some calories and helps make you feel good. Don’t underestimate it as a way to make your body happier and healthier.

5) LOADING… DROP AND GIVE ME 10! Example: before Blizzard fixed the queue times for Battlegrounds in WoW, those 7 minute downtimes were the perfect for getting in a set of sit-ups or push-ups. Over the course of several hours of gaming I could do a few hundred crunches, some lunges, a bunch of push-ups, some stretching, etc. Many games these days still have downtime of some sort, whether they be loading screens or waiting for everyone on the server to stop chatting like it’s grandma’s teatime and finally start the stinking game. Use this time!

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I’m all for breaking stereotypes about gamers, especially when the stereotypical traits lower our quality of life. Luckily, being unhealthy and out-of-shape is one of those things that we have the power to actively change. Be conscious about what you eat, use your downtime wisely, and enjoy not feeling like a blob.

An incoming New Year always seems like an appropriate time to contemplate years passed, and this year I have found myself thinking a lot about a consistent theme in my life that has been a significant guiding force behind my interests and aesthetic sensibility. Ever since I was a kid, I have secretly believed in magic. I’m not sure what this can be attributed to, though I certainly credit some early influences like the little pewter wizard holding a crystal ball that my grandmother gave to me when I was still very young (and that I still have), and books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe which taught me to always be on the lookout for hidden passageways to other worlds. My imaginative capacity plus the desire to find whatever magic waits right around the corner are very likely at the bottom of all the fantasy and sci-fi I’ve read, the hundreds of video games I’ve played, and the peculiar way I sometimes look at the world.

My love of fantasy and magic has become a background influence throughout the years, but my appreciation of it was recently stirred by Amazon.com’s announcement that they had successfully won the auction for J.K. Rowling’s Tales of the Beedle Bard, paying almost £2 million (equivalent to almost $4 million) which Rowling has dedicated to The Children’s Voice campaign, a charity that she co-founded. Aside from the amazing amounts of care and attention to detail that went into the creation of this book, I am captivated by it for several reasons. First, the manner of its creation is true to what I feel is necessary for making a magical object. The book itself is one of only seven in the world, hand illustrated and written by the author, bound in leather and adorned with silver and moonstones (side note: the stone I always wear around my neck is a moonstone). There is an element of power imbued by the author through the painstaking process of writing and drawing the contents with her own hand. This is not a mass produced item, it is something very personal, something actually crafted.

Aside from the look of the book (which I think is perfectly fantastical), the notion of transforming an object from a fantasy world into a something real is magical all by itself. This is part of the reason that people get so excited about props used in films like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. More specific to my infatuation with this artifact, however, books (along with video games) have always been some of my most trusted ambassadors to fantastical worlds, so I see them as conduits, like Alice’s looking-glass to Wonderland. And in many of the fantasy books that I like to read, the story often hinges on some secret, magical knowledge of great importance that can only be found in a legendary book. It’s no surprise, then, that books represent something essentially magical to me, and J.K. Rowling has managed to create one that is especially rare and meaningful.

Just knowing that the Tales of the Beedle Bard exists has fanned that flame of imagination that has always caused me to suspect (and hope) that the extraordinary lies just under the surface of our everyday reality. I regularly seek access to those magic realms through books, film, art, and video games, but I look for it too in the proceedings of my regular life. To this day, like I did during my childhood, whenever I manage to glimpse the fantastical through the seams in the fabric of my otherwise ordinary existence, I get an unparalleled flash of delight. The innocent suspicion that magical forces could be at play generates a kind of hope that makes my life a bit more sparkly and wondrous. It is for this reason that I am so grateful to J.K. Rowling and other such story-weavers, be they game designers or film makers. I can only aspire to one day create something that will help others access the fantasy in their seemingly ordinary lives.

Happy New Year! May this be a magical one for you.

We wish a Happy Thanksgiving to all you gamers out there! May your weekend be full of many thanks, good food, and much love for family and friends. May you also find time between cooking, eating, and chatting to play catch up with your growing stack of unplayed video games. That’s what I hope my weekend is full of, at least.

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