People lost weight, got off medications and even quit smoking. Some went from pre-diabetic to normal blood sugar responses. Blood pressures normalized and a handful picked up healthy habits that withstood the test of time. One individual, Pat P, did all of the above…..
By 2010 we were hitting our stride in workplace wellness. Other employers were either actively bringing us “onto their property” or exploring how they might in hopes that we could replicate the work we were doing throughout NJ and we had jumped into the deep-end of health data collection and mining to inform our strategy. We had established ourselves as the “health people” who not only respected those doing the work in the trenches, but were among the few willing to get right in there beside them to do our part for positive change. The days were long and the hours were no less grueling, but the results were good and playing a small role in people’s change story was amazingly powerful.
With our largest (original) client, we were seeing clear links between our original target (MSK health) and other preventable lifestyle conditions like heart and metabolic disease even though the formal evidence wasn’t quite there yet. The bi-directionality seemed obvious to us - healthier people moved better (and with less pain) and people who moved more (and better) tended to be healthier. Yet, movement alone wasn’t enough to reverse and prevent all the risks we were seeing. We did an exhaustive review and determined there were fundamental actions that sat at the root of good health and high quality of life. We eventually labeled them our “ELEMENTS”, starting first with 3: MOVE, FUEL, RECOVER, before expanding to our current 5.
The data from thousands of individual wellness screenings refined the story even further. Our clients were carrying the heavy burden of preventable disease at far too young an age and it was, quite literally, killing them. Where it got tricky was that most already knew “what” they needed to do and even had a reasonable beat on “how”, but they still weren’t actually doing it. Tucked deep in the data, formal measures and increasingly valuable “anecdotal” on-the-ground experience, was an insight that had 30 years of research backing it but hadn’t been our focus - health change was not about logic and facts, it was deeply tied to emotion, personal rituals, mindsets and readiness. We needed to prime the change, to make it fun, interesting and even inspiring. People needed to believe it was possible, worth the effort and even rewarding.
We decided that if it was going to happen, it was time to ratchet the change effort up a notch and we were the right team for the job. In January of 2010 we laid down our first “Healthy Actions Challenge” to prime the power of a healthy lifestyle. There were points that led to a trophy, as well as a leaderboard and some hype to keep things interesting, but the most important feature was tucked away in the narrative - we were going to challenge legions of utility & power workers, people who are at their best when storms are literally rolling through, to be ready for when life’s figurative, but no less inevitable, storms roll through. We would put our full energies behind the early adopters, those who were ready, and share their eventual success to inspire a far larger number of people who were just like them. People lost weight, got off medications and even quit smoking. Some went from pre-diabetic to normal blood sugar responses. Blood pressures normalized and a handful picked up healthy habits that withstood the test of time.
One individual, Pat P, did all of the above. He went from struggling with his weight and being on a clear path to cardiometabolic disease to drastically altering his risk profile, coming off all medications, falling in love with running and even inspiring his son to become a physical therapist. More than a decade later and, as of this writing well into retirement, he is still going strong. He occasionally reaches out to check in and wish me and the team well, most recently on July 5th of this year to tell me that he “saw one of our shirts” in a 5K in Dewey Beach and that it “brought back great memories”. Simple is not the same as easy, but it is possible when you’re ready.
-Mike E.
Commentaires