The Game On Diet, developed by Az Ferguson while helping "Grey's Anatomy" writer Krista Vernoff lose her post-baby weight, is poised to be the new diet sensation. There has not been a diet craze for the past couple of years, and the Game On Diet's new approach to health and fitness may be the next big craze.
The concept of the Game On Diet included its being set up as a competitive team sport. In fact, it is referred to in this clip of ABC's interview of Ferguson and Vernoff as a "game". To win the game, pounds lost are not measured. Rather, the points earned are tallied to determine the winner of the game.
The Game On Diet's points are earned by eating five small meals a day, drinking three liters of water a day, sleeping for at least seven hours, exercising for twenty minutes, and by changing one other, seemingly unrelated habit. This last step refers to health-oriented research that has proven that in order to lose and keep off a significant amount of weight, one's life must actually change in more ways than by only limiting food and exercising.
Once the winner of the Game On Diet is determined (by points earned rather than pounds lost, remember), they are rewarded with a previously chosen prize - an iPod and being treated to dinner were some of the examples given in the interview.
Is the Game On Diet just another quick fix that will let people shed a few pounds then gain back even more, or is it a real beginning to a more healthy lifestyle?
I think that it looks promising. Of course, the more wellness - oriented part of me balks at fitness being approached as a game to "win". I am more a subscriber to learning to love the feel of exercise, and learning to eat healthy foods in ways that you truly enjoy, rather as a means to an end or as a part of a competition. The Game On Diet's goal of having teams compete and having the individuals in the teams work harder to win and also to avoid the displeasure of their team members does not have me eager to promote it.
In addition, to be fair, if you look at reasons for physical fitness throughout human history, they nearly always stemmed from survival and/or competition anyway, so maybe the Game On Diet is just modernizing a concept that is innate to us already. If the lifestyle changes encouraged by the diet such as healthier eating patterns, exercise and a healthier amount of sleep can be adopted by the individuals who get started on the Game On Diet as part of their permanent lifestyle, then I am on board. For all of the theorizing that I do about being mindful and enjoying life, we do, after all, live in a busy world and everyone can't follow their innermost values and intuition all the time. There is also less of a chance of having people confuse this diet the way that was so popular with the Atkin's diet of a few years ago. With Atkin's, dieters saw that in the first step of cutting carbs, a great amount of weight was lost. Never having gotten to the point in the program where they learned that total carb-cutting was anything but healthy and opting to try to continue that drastic weight loss left many people sick, fatigued, and farther away from good health and fitness than they had been before dieting at all. The Game On diet doesn't overtly claim to retrain your digestion in a similar way, so even if it is taking a little too far, I see it as having less of a potential backlash. Having the "game", or a friendly competition that the Game On Diet provides as a springboard for a greater amount of health and wellness that is carried forward could be the key to a healthier America.
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