My Vision For A Healthier New Year

With all of the prognosticators and experts weighing in on the expected latest Health & Wellness trends for 2012, I’m going to choose to do something different this year. Yes, rather than anticipate where people will be heading with their healthy lifestyle behaviors and choices, I’d like to paint a point-by-point vision of hope for our society that will serve as a guide for achieving a higher degree of Health. It goes like this:

1. Make That Behavioral Change – it’s my hope, armed with information that reinforces the importance of healthy choices, that people and communities better define an accessible form of health for themselves, and determine how they can make discernable and rewarding healthy lifestyle improvements. Let’s not get tripped up in the details of how many calories consumed and expended, let’s focus upon what the end benefits will be for those choices. It might be keeping up with your friends and children, or it might be something as pragmatic as reducing your health care costs; it doesn’t matter, it has to be something that is deeply meaningful and important to that individual. As Marni Jameson, Your Health writer for the Orlando Sentinel puts it; “mindfulness must become the new mantra if Americans are going to override the many forces standing between them and their healthier, trimmer selves.”

2. Make A Healthy Lifestyle the Norm (and not just an isolated case) – with this as a guiding principle, communities, businesses, and individuals can align their activities around this principle in all that they do and create. From our food supply to community planning, from transportation to our education system, our vision of a healthy lifestyle for all should affect every element of our lives and society. As our current state of unhealthiness has taken us decades to create, it will surely take us years to readjust to this new paradigm, but we must start that process, and muster all of the resources required to measure progress and fulfill that vision over time. Through their actions, many communities here in the U.S. and elsewhere are making progress; modeling these communities and mining their successes for local application just makes sense.

3. Make Physical Education A Mandate In Our School Systems – interview anyone who as an adult is pursuing a healthy lifestyle, and more often than not, their first experience with the benefits of exercise and movement (let alone an appreciation for their own body) was from a school P.E. class. And yet, although a large majority of states mandate physical education in schools, most do not require a specific amount of instructional time for the subject, and more than half allow exemptions, waivers, and/or substitutions for students to skip P.E. all together. “These ‘loopholes’ continue to reduce the effectiveness of the mandate,” says a recent report by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education and the American Heart Association. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that children and adolescents do one hour or more of physical activity each day. However, according to data from the 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, less than one in four high-school students do so.

I offer these, not as an over-simplication of the issues at hand, but more so for what I view as three important, all be critical elements in creating healthier lifestyles for all. What does your vision for a Healthy Lifestyle look like? I’d truly like to know. Write me at Ed@HealthyLivingMarketing.com.

Tags: Health & Wellness, health trends, healthy lifestyles, healthy living, Healthy Living Marketing