Health is a habit.

I am convinced that the goals of a healthy lifestyle should not be  measured in weight but in the number of healthy daily habits a person adopts and now I have data.

I  recently conducted a study on my campus in which around 20 freshmen young women participated in a six week health program called Healthy VSU. Two years ago, one of my graduate students in the Behavioral Health Ph.D. program collected data on 675 Virginia State University students using a national college health survey. We found that our female students were heavier on average than males but did not classify themselves as overweight or obese.  Most of the female survey participants were currently trying to lose weight yet they did not exercise on a regular basis and a major portion didn't exercise at all. We found that the participants thought that people should eat fruits and vegetable every day. Yet, they themselves ate 0-2 servings per day (the recommendation is 9).  You can probably see how attitudes and practices such as these could contribute to some of the chronic health problems that affect African American women. So I wondered, if college was a time to introduce an intervention. Our goal was to change habits.

This past year, my 4 undergraduate research assistants and one of my colleagues designed a study based on a successful intervention model from England. The goal of the program is the formation of healthy habits. There are no pre/post measures like BMI or dress size or waist circumference or anything like that. What is measured are the number of glasses of water (fruit infused water is better than diet soda), the minutes spent moving (walking across campus is better than waiting for parking) , the number of healthy snacks eaten (raw anything is better than anything packaged), the proportion of colored vegetables/fruit on the serving plate   (it should be half of the food) and the adherence to a self-created life-style health plan.  The other goal- No more dieting, ever.

We ran our program this spring focusing on the formation of 5 habits. The website is here.

I understood from a year of studying the literature, that a life of dieting takes a mental and emotional toll. The toll  is akin to battle fatigue from warring factions -the body that I see when I look in the mirror vs the body that I want to see when I look in the mirror. However the issue is not the body. The issue is the mind  When the mind gets focused on making the body different, it becomes like any other obsession, creating a lens of distortion about a host of other things, not just the body.  I felt that the antidote was to be in the present moment and focused on present moment experience.

In an effort to address this war situation and to begin a practice of being here now, the first session focused on gratitude - not necessarily being  grateful for the body, that would be too hard. Rather, being grateful for your life, grateful for friends and for people that love you. Grateful for your health. Grateful for being in college. Grateful to be yourself.

What I learned from this study is that most of these beautiful, talented and smart young women thought of themselves most of the time in terms of their bodies and therefore spent more time on what they considered negative aspects of themselves. Asking them to identify something to be grateful for (and writing it down on a daily basis) forced an inward looking that few had practiced. Now, this was an overwhelmingly Christian group. Yet when I asked how many prayed on a daily basis less than 1% raised their hands. They were "too busy", "too rushed", "too sleepy", "too occupied" for self-inquiry. They were also clueless as to how being too busy, too rushed, too sleepy and too occupied contributed to their current eating habits and their persistent complaints about their bodies.

I am still sifting through the data that I will be presenting at a national conference in two weeks. However, in the next few blogs, I'll share with you what we found. This is not the usual way one shares behavioral science but since you, my Sacred and Fit community, have contributed so much to my own understanding about health and wholeness,  I wanted you to be the first to know. My hope is that there is something that you can use, also.

....BTW I'm sorry that while working on two research studies this semester, along with teaching and traveling etc, I was left too busy, too rushed, too sleepy and too occupied to keep up with my blog. I'm back now. It's summer!