Today I started thinking about how I was introduced to fitness. My family has always been extremely health conscious from a nutrition standpoint — my mom was a practicing nurse and she had friends that were body builders and fitness enthusiasts. I remember them telling me to get involved in fitness, but my excuse was that I didn’t want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger — now I realize how impossible that might naturally be.
Once I was in college one of my roommates was extremely fitness focused. He ate right and was in the gym several days out of the week. I still wasn’t very into fitness, and continued with my same Arnold disclaimer.
However, after watching the video of the newscaster’s response to an e-mail comment concerning her weight, I started thinking about my own health. Good health is something that I take very seriously, but I never really had any more education on the subject than anyone else.
Once I was 23 I really got into running and watching what I put into my body in terms of nutrition. I started reading websites and talking to other fitness enthusiasts about what they ate. I could only mimic what I learned from other people. But, what would have been helpful would have been a club that could have taught me how to eat properly.
Most people don’t even have the contacts that I had to learn about fitness and nutrition. Most people only have the gym that they sometimes workout at, if that.
We want to continue to discuss an obesity epidemic, but why discuss it if we can’t/won’t teach people how to avoid it. All we seem to do is point the finger at people that might have a problem finding time to exercise or making the right nutrition decisions.
I’ve known several newscasters in my line of work, and I know they work odd hours and many times don’t have the healthiest of foods sitting around the station. It’s not an excuse, but it’s also not like working at a club with a healthy café or protein shakes readily available.
The average person probably doesn’t understand what it takes to be healthy. They know that eating fast food isn’t good, but what other option do they have when they only have an hour for lunch? Where were you as their club when they needed to know information on nutrition?
We can spend a lot of time as an industry highlighting an epidemic and discussing the repercussions it could have on our health care system, but if we don’t ever make an attempt to do anything about it, we can’t keep pointing the finger.
The e-mail that was sent to the newscaster didn’t give her any information she didn’t already know. It pointed out that she was overweight and had been for some time, but it didn’t give her any additional knowledge to help her out. Why didn’t they offer to counsel her on nutrition or exercise with her? Why didn’t they offer a gym membership? There are a multitude of things we can do to help our world out, but continuing to point the finger isn’t one of them.
Tyler Montgomery is the Editor of Club Solutions Magazine. Contact him at tyler@clubsolutionsmagazine.com
