Childhood obesity – see the new single seat size – how much will the conversions cost?
I kid you not, I was in Westmed Health Groups offices the other day and the seat on the right is the new single seat size to accommodate the knock on effect of the epidemic that’s with us now. Indeed, as I took the BX7 bus from Riverdale to the A train at W207 last night, I sat in a three seat row with a large lady in the middle seat of such proportions that I couldn’t squeeze in to the seat on either side of her. How much will this cost just to refit the buses, the planes, let alone the health costs of coping with the illness and early death of these poor souls.
HealthCorps and the efforts their valiant coordinators are making is something the nation should be focussing on right now.
See what Dr Oz said in New York this week on HealthCorps Peer Group Mentoring Approach:
Dr. Oz: Why ‘mentoring is the way to go’
Why is peer-to-peer mentoring the right approach to take to teach kids about their health?
Well, part of it is because I have kids. I was asked by their school to give a talk to them once about 10 years ago, and they seemed sort of bored but I gave the talk anyway. The next day, as I got to the hospital, I had probably a dozen phone calls from corporate executives, lawyers [and] other doctors saying their kids had come home that night and had told them things like “If you have a piece of bread, it’s like having a candy bar.” And it began a process in my mind: If we can get these kids to talk with each other in a way that makes it cool to push back against your parents, they’ll do it. I’m not the one to deliver that message, but I can get college kids to do it. I was working a lot with Timmy Shriver and Maria Shriver, and their father, Sargent, started the Peace Corps, so I put the two experiences together. I said, “You know what? We can create an organization where we use the same kind of enthusiastic energy that young college graduates have, put them back in schools around the country and allow for that unique experience when a 21-year-old talks to a 17-year-old.” I’m not the right person to deliver the message, but I can give the 21-year-old the information they need to make it happen. That was the foundation of the concept. And I think the best way of scaling a program, inexpensively building it and touching a lot of lives — mentoring is the way to go. These volunteers are able to go out and do a lot of good. And they only do it for a couple years — they go off to med school or whatever they want to do in life — but it gives them two years of really great experience and it gives us two years of their service, which is hugely valuable.
What are your goals for the program, and what are you doing to reach them?
I want to have HealthCorps schools in every major city in America, and I want to have them in every state. We may not be in every school, and I think one of the things we’re learning is that we can develop [the] best practices from the many schools we’re in that other schools can adopt and begin to use in their own programs. We’re gonna call it HealthCorps University. So either you’ll have one of my volunteers in your school who will teach your kids about health, and [for] anybody else, health teachers can take the syllabus and use it on their own. It’s written in a way that’s very accessible to high schoolers, and it’s free, so it takes away a lot of the obstacles to implementing it.
How can parents get involved?
The most important thing for parents to do is to get their kids to either use the website and the content on it or, more importantly, talk to their school systems about whether they can have a HealthCorps program there. What makes the school systems great is the teachers and the parents collaborating. We have wonderful programs that we have started primarily because parents went to schools and said, “I see this program, I want to have it.” And then [they] find some kind of a hybrid program that’s affordable and works.
The first class we went into today, Ms Butler’s was a relatively difficult one, made so by our presenter, Alan Wherry, who tried to show the students how to balance their energy channels but not enough of them can yet be in mental silence and they couldn’t handle the additional step. This is after six weeks practicing Sahaja Meditation. There’s quite a lesson here in that it’s important to be sure that a class can meditate well before attempting anything else. Instead, we had giggling, trying to distact others and other forms of nervousness and inability to focus. But we used to session to discuss being able to be detached from what’s going on around us, an essential for doing homework in a busy, noisy apartment, not to mention not getting into trouble when provoked by another student. One young woman got the importance of being able to stay detached and said it enables you to be the bigger person. Next class was Mr. Montefote’s class which is a special needs class. Here last week, Alan learned the meaning of homeostasis, the ability of every life form on the planet to achieve a balance with the surrounding environment and hence to survive. Only two students of the twelve or so in the class can mediate in thoughtless awareness, the rest don’t have the attention for it yet, but at least they were respectful towards others and remained silence. It’s interesting that there isn’t any patterns in this – for example, we had a special needs class in Ms Mac’s last school who could meditate beautifully from week one and really enjoyed it too. Our first class with Ms Brown, about twelve students meditated well but took time to settle. Ms. Klein’s dance class, as has been the case, found it difficult to focus – surprising because how can you dance well without being able to focus on what you’re doing. Instead of meditating, Alan asked to see who of them could be quiet for two minutes, so we sat in a circle and one girl immediately made noises and two others did. Frankly, I was surprised that the others could remain silent for so long, and we’ll try three minutes next week. The point that comes across is that we have to start where the students are at, not at some theoretical point where we’d like them to be. Ms Mac then took us to meet Mr. Tatis and Mr. Ivan, the latter teaches Spanish and human rights. They have asked that we teach them Sahaja Meditation and we’ll get to school in future at 7.25am on Mondays for this. I’m not entirely clear but I think these two gentlemen want to learn how to teach Sahaja Meditation to their students. An interesting challenge. Mr. Felix’s art class – here, nearly all the students meditated beautifully. I asked them what they now thought of Sahaja Meditation. More than half said they loved it, Some six or so, said it was so-so and one brave soul said it was boring! I riffed a bit on states of consciousness – happiness/unhappiness, being bored, but said that if in thoughtless awareness, I couldn’t understand how that could be boring because we’re in the present and what was boring about that? Mr. Felix, like me, is a fan of William Blake – the phrase “mind-forged manacles” came up. Ms. Housen’s class – eight students meditated well, four less so – I wrote on the whiteboard “mind-forged manacles” and asked them what it meant. They didn’t know, even though Ms. Housen had had it on a vocabulary list a couple of weeks ago. I said, manacles were iron, chains, of the kind they used to put prisoners in – “And slaves,”said Ms Housen pointedly. “Indeed”, slaves too. Mind-forged manacles, I suggested, is a subtle modern form of slavery, as seen by Blake two hundred years ago. To Ms Brown’s second class. She was coaching her class on how to produce a collage and suggested various topics – including consumerism.The students talked about various types of desirable sneakers, Air J’s etc. Â Again, I wrote “Mind-forged manacles” on the whiteboard and observed that in some schools if you turn up wearing the wrong brand of sneakers, it’s as though you’ve committed a terrible crime against humanity. We all meditated beautifully, much better than in previous weeks. Ms. Brown used a phrase I liked “Laced up” – obviously in reference to sneakers – but I heard it in the context of being tied, unfree. My Urban Dictionary has many different definitions, here’s one:
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