I was bemused to read today in The Times today that the Government’s response to the UK being rated a dismal 21st out of 32 countries in Europe for physical activity rates, is to hire Arlene Phillips, the sacked reality TV judge for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ as a dance champion tasked with encouraging more people to join dance classes.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive fan of dance – I love dancing myself, I love watching it and I am among those who for whom Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday is a firm fixture in the diary and usually results in me trying to sign up for Tango classes buoyed by watching the first show.
My gripe is not with the fact they’ve hired Arlene Phillips (she should never have been sacked from Strictly!) or that they’re proposing to get people dancing to get them active, my gripe is with the Government's approach to addressing this issue.
The fact is that Government have been trying for the last 10 years to tackle rising obesity rates with a range of initiatives aimed at encouraging people to adopt more healthy lifestyles……..and Andy Burnham is admitting today that in general, they haven’t worked.
So, my question is, why are they launching another initiative which involves promoting another form of physical exercise, when this approach quite clearly hasn’t worked over the last 10 years? Why are they not going one stage further back and looking at what is stopping people taking up physical exercise, what habits and beliefs do they have about themselves that are preventing them signing up?
The point is that although the Government want the end result to be people exercising their bodies, the motivation to take up exercise starts with the mind and in many cases this needs to be addressed first.
If I am someone who has been brought up in a family where healthy food and exercise is not a priority, just telling me that they are, is probably not going to change my mind because my beliefs were set quite a while ago that they’re not important.
It seems to me that the Government would be much better off launching a nationwide initiative to identify those people for whom an active lifestyle is not a priority and working with them to get to the root of why this is so and then providing them with access to professionals who can help them to change their thinking so that they then become open-minded to whatever physical initiatives the Government is proposing – hopefully then, Arlene will have some full dance classes!
Katharine Tipper
www.twpartnership.co.uk
katharine@twpartnership.co.uk
Thursday 13 August 2009
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