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Health & Fitness

Georgian Court Launches Healthy Campus 2020 Initiative

In Star Trek, Mr. Spock tells people to live long and prosper, but he doesn’t tell them how to do it.

Healthy Campus 2020 . . . Wellness Together, a new initiative starting this fall at Georgian Court University, will help students, faculty, and staff learn how to live longer, healthier lives and hopefully prosper for it.

As a part of a nationwide movement, the Healthy Campus Coalition determined early on that Healthy Campus 2020 needed to be more than a set of objectives. It needed to be a toolkit to assist higher education professionals in implementing initiatives that could have a lasting impact on campus communities, according to its Web site.

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Instead of the traditional path of diagnosis, treatment, and care at clinics or doctors’ offices, a campuswide, peer approach will be based on wellness behaviors that can be measured.

“We’re going to have an evidence-based approach to support development and learning,” explained GCU Director of Health Services Cynthia Mattia, B.S.N., R.N.-C. “We hope this healthy campus approach increases success, productivity, student retention, and lifelong learning through an environment centered on wellness behavior.”

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The three health objectives are:

  • Stress/Anxiety/Sleep: Learn at least one way to reduce stress and increase the percentage of students who report getting enough sleep.
  • Physical Activity: Increase number of people using the gym regularly.
  • Nutrition and Weight: Increase the percentage of students who eat five or more servings of fruits or vegetables per day, eat a healthy breakfast, and receive information on dietary behavior and nutrition.

“French fries are not a vegetable,” notes Ms. Mattia.

Interested students will be trained to be peer leaders. The program is not mandatory.

“No student is going to listen to someone 30, 40, 50, or 60 years old lecturing them on getting eight hours of sleep a day,” she says. “We have to come up with a peer program that they can actually meet these objectives.”

A free wellness expo is planned to kick off the initiative from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 12, in the Casino on the Lakewood campus. Ms. Mattia says the Health Center, the Department of Holistic Health and Exercise Science, the GCU–Meridian Health School of Nursing, and the Office of Human Resources will be involved. Demonstrations of water yoga, Qigong—an ancient Chinese health care system that integrates physical postures, breathing techniques, and focused intentions—and energy medicine will be featured, along with a flu clinic, blood sugar testing, BMI calculations, and blood pressure screenings. Presenters will also have information on everything from managing stress and smoking cessation to how to read food labels and healthy sleep patterns. No reservations are required to attend the expo.

“Health promotion is the basis of the Affordable Care Act,” says Ms. Mattia. “We need to make students cognizant of that so they learn to take care of themselves at a younger age. This will get everybody to realize how important of a healthy lifestyle is and the impact it makes.”

“A huge percentage of people are overweight with chronic illnesses,” she says. “Hopefully these healthy behaviors instilled in younger people now will last the rest of their lives.”

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