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Fit for 2005: Can Saskatchewan do it?
by Ashley Martin
the Carillon
Can Saskatchewan become the healthiest and most active province in Canada for 2005? In Motion thinks they can.
In Motion is a province-wide campaign that encourages physical activity for health purposes. In partnership with the Saskatchewan Parks and Recreation Association, the Saskatoon Health Region, the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, SaskCulture Inc. and Sask Sport Inc.; they hope that Saskatchewan people will respond to the encouragement and get active.
“We’ve launched a major public awareness campaign,” says Cathie Kryzanowski, manager of the Saskatchewan In Motion movement.
In Motion reaches people through television and radio commercials, newspaper ads and their website. They research and evaluate the response of Saskatchewan citizens to these types of media.
“We’re also figuring out how active we are as a province, who’s active and who’s not and why not,” Kryzanowski says.
Saskatchewan people are extremely inactive. One-third of adults are defined as obese. Fifty-two per cent of adults and 68 per cent of youth aged 13-19 are not active enough. This means that at least 52 per cent of university students are not active enough. Ninety-one per cent of campus women have attempted to control their weight through dieting; 22 per cent say they’ve dieted often.
Time is a major factor in the inactivity of Saskatchewan people.
“Time is the number one barrier for everyone, regardless of whether you’re a university student or not,” Kryzanowski says. “It’s one of the barriers that we’re looking to remove for physical activity across the board.”
Exercising five times a week in half-hour intervals helps people to be happier, healthier, more energetic and less stressed. It can also reduce the risks of diseases that are attributed to obesity: type II diabetes by 90 per cent, heart disease by 60 per cent, breast cancer by 11per cent and colon cancer by 10 per cent.
Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing over 300,000 people per year.
“It’s not a tough problem to fix,” says Dr. June LeDrew, assistant dean of the U of R Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies. “We need to turn off the TVs and computer games.”
Unhealthy lifestyles are the result of bad habits and adults are instilling these bad habits into their children.
“Right now we see heavier kids and don’t think too much about it, but it’s going to affect their lifestyles. It’s going to affect their health and they’re going to have poor behaviour when they’re adults,” LeDrew says. “I don’t want to be a fear monger, but maybe we need a couple teenagers to have a heart attack of overweight, diabetes-related causes, and then we’ll see it as a problem.”
In Motion is trying to encourage children and youth to become more active in a school setting. They’re also concentrating on five other areas: physical activity in inactive adults, physical activity in older adults, physical activity in the workplace, a diabetes prevention strategy and doctor-prescribed physical activity.
“We’ve received an incredibly positive response to the campaign,” Kryzanowski says. “A lot of people are saying it’s about time we did something about this. It’s a little bit too early to say whether people will be more active or not, but hopefully they will.”
“I hope the In Motion campaign succeeds. Whether it will be the incentive people need to get active, I don’t know,” says LeDrew.
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