California Has a Plan For Fighting Unhealhty Behavior

The CA Department of Public Health, through its Network For a Healthy California, has developed Take Action!, a free 10-week web-based program for employees of California businesses that will empower them to adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Why are they doing this? Consider this quote from the introduction to the Take Action! Program Overview (which you can download by clicking the previous link): California residents have gained 360 million pounds of excess weight in the past ten years, a rate that is among the fastest in the country. A third of our children, one in four teens, and over half of all adults are already overweight or obese.

The impact of this extra weight? According to the CA Department of Health, "rates of chronic disease and disability associated with poor diet and inactivity continue to escalate year after year and are costing California $28 billion annually."

The Take Action! plan is a wellness plan that has great potential to improve health and productivity because of one key ingredient that many similar plans lack: SIMPLICITY. The plan provides two paths to better health: 1. include more fruits and veggies in the diet, 2. increase regular physical activity. The plan realizes that asking people to embrace both paths at the same time is not likely to achieve the desired outcome. So it simply asks participants to just pick one, and be willing to follow the guidelines in the plan for that path. The plan provides a week by week guideline for employers to maximize the plan's effectiveness.

If you are in a position to introduce a wellness plan into your workplace, definitely check out Take Action!