When I first heard of the "My Weight Loss Coach" 'game' for the Nintendo DS, I have to admit I was excited. From everything I heard and saw about it, it seemed like it would be a big help in my goal to lose weight and get in shape, something which I have tried to do numerous times and have failed spectacularly at each time.

But I was doubtful at the same time. After all, what would be the difference between a machine telling me to go out and exercise and a personal coach at the gym telling me the same thing? (Aside, of course, from cost.) But still, I decided to give it a try. I spent $40 on the game, thinking that if nothing else, I'd get a shiny new pedometre for my troubles.

I haven't had the game for long, but I seriously doubt I'll regret my purchase.

Most exercise plans tell you to do big things, right from the get-go, and work up to even bigger things as you go. Most gyms will try to convince you that the best place you can exercise is in their facility, under the care of their personal trainers, and of course only after you've paid them a monthly fee for the use of their facilities.

Most diet plans involve cutting a lot of things out of your diet, be they carbs, refined foods, foods that have vowels in the name, etc. They thrive on telling you that a new study has shown something you've always eaten to be bad for you, and that's why you're so fat! Stop eating it right away, and start eating right, the way we tell you!

My Weight Loss Coach takes a slightly different approach. Rather than making you jump right in the deep end and hoping you can swim, it guides you into the water step by little step, until you're so used to the water that you can't remember a time when it wasn't part of your life.

The philosophy behind the game is to get you to do small but beneficial things on a constant basis, which will eventually become habit and you'll continue to do them without thinking about them. Instead of telling you that you need to drink at least 2 litres of water per day, for example, it'll start out slow by telling you to drink a glass of water before your meals that day.

It also tailors your goals to the data you enter into the system. For example, someone who is 5'2" and weighs 235 pounds is going to have different diet and exercise goals than someone who is 5'8" and weights 160 pounds, or someone who's 6 feet tall and weighs 100 pounds on a good day. Unlike a lot of fad diet and exercise plans, it doesn't assume that everyone has the same needs and goals.

The daily goals of the game can be broken down into 4 separate categories. The first one is how many steps you walk. This is tracked by the pedometre that comes bundled with the game. Clip it to your pants (or stick it in your pocket, just so long as it registers your steps) and carry it with you wherever you go, and you'll find that you probably walk a lot more than you thought you did.

Statistics show that the average American walks between 4000 and 6000 steps per day. Now that may seem like a lot, but consider this: how many steps does it take for you to walk from your bedroom to the bathroom? Or from the living room to the kitchen and back? How many times do you wander through your home each day, just doing everyday household things? Those steps add up. Every time you're up and doing something, you're working your muscles and burning calories. Not many, mind you, but every little bit helps.

Which is a big part of the game's philosophy. "Every little bit helps." 50 steps may not seem like much, but do it 10 times a day and you're already at 500 steps. Double that and it's 1000. The game will give you a step count goal to reach in a day, based on your height and weight and other factors which will be introduced later.

Another advantage the having the pedometre measure your step count is that it gives youan easy way to give yourself challenges. Did you walk 4000 steps yesterday? Try and do 4500 today, just to prove to yourself that you can beat your previous record. If you have that mindset, then soon you'll find yourself looking for excuses to go out for walks.

Each day you take take up to 6 challenges, which you can choose from a list of randomly chosen ones in the game's Challenge Bank. (You gain access to more challenges by completing Coaching Sessions and playing games, which I'll talk about later.)

There are two main categories of challenge. The first is a food-related challenge. It could be anything from drinking a glass of water before your next meal to looking up recipes for soup to eating carrot sticks instead of potato chips that day. The challenges are small and easy to accomplish, so long as you actually get up and do them instead of just sitting back and forgetting about them. Remember, the point of the game is to motivate you.

The swecond type of challenge is a physical challenge. This can be anything from calling a friend and inviting them on a walk to going jogging until you see an animal, then walking home sedately.Or eve very easy things like standing up and sitting down ten times in a row. Anything and everything to get you moving!

These two types of challenges can be broken down even further into Minute or 24-Hour challenges. Minute ones are things that you do immediately, and they don't take very long. Maybe it will tell you to go drink a glass of water, or to do 5 pushups.

24-Hour challenges are exactly what they sound like. The game will give you a challenge, like walking an extra 2000 steps or taking time to thoroughly chew your next meal, and you have 24 hours to accomplish it. You could finish it in the next five minutes, or with seconds to spare. The game doesn't care. So long as it's done, and it gives you the time to do it.

Any type of exercise counts here, and they have a wide list of things you can input. Anything from yoga to going shopping to martial arts to swimming to team sports. You choose your activity from the list, and then input how long you did it for. Very simple.

The goal is typically to do half an hour of exercise per day, and that has to be constant movement. You can't count the 30 seconds you spent pacing around waiting for the taxi to arrive.

The game will convert your activity into energy units, which equal approximately 50 calories per unit. Walking for half an hour, for example, uses up about 4 energy units, or approximately 200 calories. This makes it a nice way to track just how many calories you've burned in the course of your daily exercise, if you're a calorie counter. It also plays a vital part in determining what the next section of this Hub will discuss.

When the game talks about food balance, it isn't talking about having a healthy balanced diet by choosing the right servings from each of the food groups. Instead, it's referring to the amount of energy units you need to consume in a day. This is affected by many things.

For starters, your height and weight (which the game converts into BMI, by the way) will determine approximately how many energy units you typically need in a day. The game will also subtract a certain amount from that total if you need to lose weight, and add some if you need to gain weight. (Despite the name, this approach to diet and exercise can also help those who are underweight, and it has the figures to handle that.) Your job here is to keep track of what you eat in a day.

You can choose from a long list of foods, broken up into various categories. Snacks, fast food, drinks, various meats, lots of fruits and vegetables, and all of them are given energy unit values for their serving size. If you ate half a cup of fruit as a snack, that's worth 1 energy unit. Drag the little picture of a bowl of fruit to the stick figure, who will eat it to show that you have consumed that. Thus you can see if you're eating too much or too little during your day, or if you're balanced properly in terms of energy consumption.

Now here's the tricky part. Every time you input exercise, some of the energy units that you burned will be added to the amount of energy units you need to consume in the day. This may seem a bit counterproductive, but the reasoning is quite sound. Remember, the game has already subtracted or added units based on whether you want to gain or lose weight, so you're not just going to be breaking even every day.

The reason they add the units is because the basic energy requirements for the day assumes you're doing nothing. It assumes you're sitting on the couch all day and watching TV and not doing any physical exercise whatsoever. When you do activity, you need to give your body the energy to make up for it, either before or after. If you walk for an hour and don't compensate somehow, you could suffer from low blood sugar (I speak from person experience when I say this isn't fun), lose weight too quickly, or throw your body out of balance in other ways. The goal is to balance your energy intake with your energy usage, bearing in mind the game has already subtracted a little to help you lose weight in the first place.

Make sense? Don't worry if it doesn't at first. Do it for a few days and you'll see what I mean. Sometimes these things make a lot more sense when you see them in action.

By meeting your daily goals in each of these four categories, you can be on your way to a healthier lifestyle in no time, and you'll barely notice it's happening. And after a while some of the challenges you're accepting will just be a part of your daily life, and you'll be better for it.

And now, we'll look a little deeper at one of my favourite parts of the game!

The coaching sessions are unlocked by accomplishing a certain number of challenges, and are designed to help tailor the challenges to what will suit you best. It won't to much good to suggest that you go out and join the local hockey team when you prefer doing solo activities, and it won't do much good to tell you to cook more when you already cook every meal you eat.

You will be asked questions and you pick the choice that sounds the most like you. Through this, the game will determine your habits and lifestyle and will give you challenges that are most suited to you. But it will also ask you if you want to receive challenges based on what it determines, again so that you're not being told to do something you're already doing all the time. It's a very good way to personalize the game and to make things more enjoyable.

Each coaching session has a theme. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they weren't just specifically about your diet and exercise habits.One coaching session is about about spending less money to get the same quality that you love. Another deals with keeping your home clean, on the basis that a clean kitchen makes it easier to cook which means you're more likely to be able to cook healthy things. It's not just about changing your dietary and exercise habits, it's an entire lifestyle overhaul, based around getting healthy. It recognises that there's more to good health than just what you do and what you eat, and I have to say I like that very much. Sometimes I do need reminding to wash the dishes. Then I have clean plates and pots and pans and think to myself, "Ooh, I feel like baking a loaf of bread! And now I have the kitchen cleaned a little more and the stuff to do it with." And I feel better all around.

Or if I'm spending more on groceries than I need to because I didn't understand that a brand name doesn't always mean the best quality, the game has just taught me ways to save a few dollars, too. If that happens enough, then the game just paid for itself

I could spend $40 on a month at the gym and get a personal coach telling me what to do. or I could spend $40 on this game and have it around for years, potentially, giving me daily advice and making sure that I take the little steps that are necessary to forming a habit. This isn't just a game and a pedometre. It's a step to getting my life in order, to having a healthier body, to improving myself without going broke to do it. It's a lifestyle coach in the form of an enthusiastic and encouraging stick figure on a screen, helping me along the way and giving me someone to answer to, which is a vital part of the process for many people, one that doesn't get taken into account very much when people go on self-determined diets or exercise plans. Without someone to answer to, there may not be enough motivation to keep going.Skip a day and rationalize it away, and there goes your whole routine, and it becomes easier to skip it again and again...

But whenever you feel that pedometre in your pocket, you get a reminder of what you're working towards. When you see your Nintendo DS sitting there on the table, you know that it's helping you improve your life, and you remember to log in and tell it, "Yes, I walked 6000 steps today!" Even if it's a bunch of pixels and coding, it's something, small but important.

I most definitely recommend this to anyone looking to lose weight, especially those who can't afford lavish gym membership and/or those to whom the 'little steps' philosophy appeals. Same to those who are underweight and want to try to change that. Weighing too little can be just as unhealthy as weighing too much.

And now if you'll excuse me, I feel the need to go take another walk. I haven't met my daily goal yet, after all.