So last night I thought I would try and shave a few more seconds off my Wii Fit slalom advanced high score (43s). Although there's lots of room for improvement, I thought I was doing quite well. That was until I saw a clip on YouTube of someone doing it in 28.71s! It was almost enough for me to give up and go to bed - that was until I read the comments on the page.

It turns out that if you kneel down behind the board and place your palms on the top left and right corners not only is it easier to position your weight so that it stays in the blue bar for maximum speed, it's also easier to control left and right. I gave it a try and sure enough in my first attempt I took over 8 seconds off my previous best - a bit of a hollow victory though.

Strangely enough, you never see the guy standing on the balance board when he gets that time so until such time as I actually see someone beating 30s while standing, I will remain a sceptic.

The signs were there from the beginning. I knew before I even stood on it that the thing would tell me that I was overweight. The clue was in three letters – BMI or Body Mass Index.

BMI is essentially a statistical measure of the weight of a person scaled according to height. The problem is that BMI was never intended to be a definitive measure for everyone but rather a simple means of classifying sedentary individuals of average body composition which means that for a lot of people, BMI is not a true reflection of their physical condition.

Take me for example, at around 6 foot tall and just over 200lbs my BMI is nudging 28 which puts me at the top end of the overweight category. But I don't think I'm overweight. I go to gym 4 times a week, push fairly heavy weights and have the outline of a sixpack (if I tense really hard and squint a bit).

The fact is that the medical establishment has generally acknowledged the shortcomings of BMI because it does not take into consideration factors such as frame size and an individual's fat to muscle ratio. So why did Nintendo choose to use BMI with Wii Fit? I think it's partly because a large proportion of Wii Fit users WILL BE sedentary individuals of average body composition. The other reason may have had something to do with the fact that, as far as I'm aware, there are no other internationally recognised weight-based categorisation systems, so a flawed system is better than no system at all. And to have tried to come up with their own classification system would have raised more issues that it would have solved.

So I don't have a problem with Wii Fit telling me that I'm overweight, but not everyone could feel the same way. For some, even if they suspected that they were overweight, being told by a cheery video game that you actually are overweight, or even obese, may go one of two ways. Our newly weight-challenged friend could finally receive the wakeup call they needed to kick start a positive change in lifestyle or they could simply throw Wii Fit out of the window together with its Wii Board from hell. I certainly hope it's the former response.