In some ways, the American obsession with health is almost comical. As the world’s fattest nation, we’re always mesmerized by the newest gimmick promising to give us smaller bellies, a tighter butt, or bigger biceps. Problem is, these quick-fix schemes never work, and our national obesity rate marches ever higher as we munch on fast food meals packed with enough calories to handle our bodily needs for a week, all the while sitting on the couch wondering why the people on TV look so much better than we do. Now, Nintendo has decided to get a piece of the fitness action with the wildly popular Wii Fit, and while it’s no panacea for your weight woes, used regularly it’s not a bad supplement to more strenuous exercise.

Wii Fit is the first game to make use of the Balance Board peripheral which is packed in with the title. This newest piece of plastic to clutter up your home is actually mildly useful, with the ability to give you accurate weight measurements as well as tracking your center of gravity. To its credit, the board is incredibly responsive, able to shift even the tiniest tremors in your balance, and responding accordingly on-screen. Nintendo has big plans for the contraption, and if its debut is any gauge, it could very well be one of the few extra devices the company sells that’s actually worth the price of admission.

As for the game (if you can call it that), Wii Fit acts as a sort of digital trainer, monitoring your weight and body mass index (BMI), and allowing you to track changes in your body’s composition. Upon first booting up Wii Fit, you are asked to create a profile using one of your Miis which will act as your home base for the rest of the experience. After getting your initial weight and BMI, the title will ask you what you want your exercise goal to be. This can be simple and quick, such as shedding a pound this week, or long and far-reaching, like dropping 20 lbs in six months.

Once you’ve set a goal, the game will ask you to take daily body tests in order to keep track of how you’re doing. While this seems like a good idea, many fitness experts agree that it’s actually one of the worst fitness ideas out there because it simply provides you with too much information. Since weight can vary by 2-3 lbs a day, you may be doing everything right, but still end up putting on weight due to water retention or slow digestion. It doesn’t help that when days like this occur, the game then prompts you to tell it why you’re getting fatter, instead of just letting it go. While a few consecutive days losing weight may really keep you motivated, the second that progress plateaus or reverses, it’s very difficult to keep going when you know that a video game is going to call you out.

Making matters worse is the fact that Wii Fit uses BMI to measure fitness, which is widely accepted to be one of the worst methods for calculating fitness. This method plugs your weight and height into a formula and spits out a number without accounting for body composition in any way. Therefore, a short, muscular person would easily qualify as overweight according to BMI (muscle is denser than fat, and therefore weighs more), and then be subjected to staring at a tubby onscreen Mii while the game lectures them about being healthier. While it’s impossible for the Balance Board to really measure body fat or health any other way, it might have been a better idea to scrap the whole concept of including BMI altogether and simply stick with measurements of weight alone.