You want results? How’s this:
• A combined 29,913.2 pounds lost (15 tons)
• 336,351.3 hours of exercise (38 years)
• 5,344,121,396 steps taken, as logged by pedometers (2.7 million miles)
Or on average, 7 pounds lost, 4.8 hours per week of exercise, and 9,281 steps taken each day.
That’s what the 12,000 people who participated in this year’s Shape Up RI competition accomplished between Feb. 2 and April 27, according to the program’s organizers, who recently wrapped up the session with a closing awards ceremony and wellness fair.
Individual participants and teams did even better; the weight-loss winners, for example, a team from The Westerly Sun, lost an average of 12.4 percent of their weight.
But here’s the thing – Shape Up RI, founder Rajiv Kumar will tell you, isn’t really about losing weight, or joining a gym, or walking so many miles each day. It’s about using the power of community and teamwork to set Rhode Islanders on a healthier path for life.
“Most people go about it alone,” Kumar said in an interview. “They join a gym or they go on a diet, and because they do it alone, they don’t have a support network, they don’t have people to do it with them, they don’t have accountability, they don’t have as much motivation.”
So Kumar, now a third-year medical student at Brown University, took a different approach.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could bring people together as a community?” Kumar said. “There is so much power in the concept of teamwork. … We believe in sharing ideas, taking the strengths from everybody and bringing them together. And it makes it more fun.”
Kumar says he launched Shape Up RI because as he studied medicine, shadowed doctors and learned more about health issues, he was struck by the huge role played by obesity, poor diets and sedentary lifestyles – linked to heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and so much more.
“We don’t have a cure for many illnesses … but we do have a way to reverse obesity,” he said. “And we’re expending so many resources after people are very sick, but if we can help people get on a healthy lifestyle, we can prevent the onset of all these diseases. We can prevent so much suffering and such a huge economic toll on our nation.”
Kumar saw Shape Up RI as a community initiative, but he quickly discovered its greatest appeal was as a workplace wellness program.
“We realized employers have a real stake in the health of their employees,” Kumar said. “And when somebody else is willing to fund the program and willing to promote it, participants are more likely to sign up.”
While Shape Up RI wasn’t conceived as a workplace wellness program, he said, “it works really well in the workplace,” both because workplaces tend to breed “really unhealthy behaviors” such as “bagel Thursdays” and long hours sitting at a desk, and because coworkers can make a real difference if they come together.
The program costs only $15 per person, in exchange for which participants get a free pedometer to track how many steps they walk; a blue wristband; a weekly newsletter with expert advice, educational materials and listings of wellness resources and events; scores of free workshops; access to a Web site to track each team’s accomplishments and free passes to gyms and fitness classes. Many employers pay the full cost; others pay part.
Along with the $15 fees, the program’s major sources of revenue are grants from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island – its single-biggest sponsor, contributing almost $50,000 this year – and Lifespan, which is contributing $20,000 this year.
But the whole model is meant to be inexpensive and very scaleable. In fact, it’s grown from 1,800 people in 2006, to 7,000 last year, to 12,000 this year, with a goal of 20,000 for next year, and eventually 40,000 – what Kumar views as the “tipping point” to make a major impact.
Recruitment is done through team captains, taking a “viral marketing” approach, Kumar said. In addition, Kumar speaks about the program at events across the state and beyond.
Irving Schneider, president of the Providence campus of Johnson & Wales University, said he learned about Shape Up RI in the context of Gov. Donald L. Carcieri’s statewide wellness initiative, and he saw it as a good investment in the health and well-being of the campus’ roughly 1,200 employees. The university joined this year, with 47 teams, and he said it’s created a sense of friendly competition, camaraderie, and “total community involvement.”
Brandon Melton, senior vice president of human resources at Lifespan, which had more than 2,500 employees in 288 teams in the program this year, said Shape Up RI is particularly effective because of its team approach, the fun and competitive spirit, and the flexibility.
“There is something for everyone,” he said. “You could be in peak condition or you could’ve never done exercise in your life and you could find a way to enter.”
Melton himself has done it two years in a row; last year, he lost 22 pounds, and this year he set a goal of increasing his weekly workouts from three to four.
The company is developing programs to support participants after Shape Up RI is over, such as a four-month follow-up study/support program led by Rena Wing, a Brown professor and director of the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center at The Miriam Hospital.
Wing is also measuring the program’s statewide results and she just submitted an article to the Journal of American Medical Association analyzing the data so far. For example, Kumar said, she found an average body-mass reduction of 1.2 percent, or 8 to 10 pounds.
Others are also looking at Shape Up RI as a possible model. Kumar himself took ideas for an initiative started in Iowa in 2002 that now has about 30,000 participants, but he made it more workplace friendly, developed the viral marketing approach, and made other adjustments. Now, he said, “we get approached almost every week about replicating the model.”
Asked how Shape Up RI could be improved, Kumar said one of the biggest challenges is reaching lower-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by obesity but also less likely to have regular Internet access. Thus, creative outreach is key, he said, and so is making the program as easy as possible to implement.
But the central idea is as strong as ever: Bringing the community together to promote health.
Participants come from all 39 cities and towns in the state, he said. “We have participants from every socioeconomic group, as young as 18, as old as 82, from triathletes to new exercisers. … We’re creating a sense that we really have to band together if we want to change society.” •
