It’s Christmas shopping season again and I have a recommendation for the best gift to buy your favorite techie.

Heart diseases is the number one cause of death in the United States. Diseases of the heart cause 28.5% of all U.S. deaths, even more deaths than cancer.

Many of these early deaths are preventable with little more than proper weight control. Weight control relies on two components: diet and exercise.

Personally, the only diet which has worked well for me is the low-carb Atkins Diet. The Atkins Diet works well for me because it keeps my insulin levels in check while still allowing me to keep my weight down.

Exercise is hard for techies. Most of us enjoy our work, which means that most of us work long hours. We don’t have a lot of time to go to the gym or join a softball league.

Worse, the nature of the Internet has led most of us techies to develop very short attention spans. We can’t force ourselves to jog or lift weights for half an hour, because there is just not enough mental stimulation during that time.

So what does this have to do with Christmas? My recommendation for a Christmas gift is the Wii Fit from Nintendo.

The Wii Fit is a specialized controller for the Nintendo Wii gaming system. The Wii Fit turns the Wii gaming system into a high-tech exercise system.

The Wii Fit isn’t just hardware, it comes with software which manages an entire exercise program. This software is designed to work with the attention span issues endemic among true technophiles.

Using the Wii Fit to get into shape doesn’t require extensive scheduling or coordination with groups of people.
Your favorite technie can take a break from his computer, jump on the Wii for 15 minutes, and then get right back to the Internet.

And best of all, the Wii software makes it all seem like a computer game.