Twenty years ago, Americans were working 164 hours less per year than they are today. The shift to sedentary jobs - exacerbated by the fact that most employees are connected online and spend over 50% of their time communicating over the Internet - is creating an overweight/obesity epidemic with working Americans. This epidemic costs employers over $225.8 Billion per year in health-related productivity losses.
The American Heart Association set out to do something about this problem that costs businesses $3,000.00 per employee, per year. Being obese/overweight is a preventable illness and the AHA determined that people need help -- and companies need help too.
Scientific research of the AHA showed individuals can gain two hours of life expectancy for each hour of regular, vigorous exercise and brisk walking for 30 minutes a day can reduce risk of stroke, bad cholesterol (LDL) levels and high blood pressure.
Given these facts, and that walking has the lowest drop-out rate of any physical activity, we created the www.startwalkingnow.org and www.facebook.com/startwalkingnow platform.
The objective: Get as many of America's employees into a walking program through Start! and monitor the changes in the employee's exercise/walking behavior with support from company management and Human Resources.
To date: Over 30k companies are engaged in Start Walking Now! 1300 companies qualify as "Fit-Friendly"; over 1 million employees in 19,000 companies conduct Start! Heart Walks locally each year through 400 events, while hundreds of thousands get walking during AHA's annual National Start! Walking Day in April.
Donations exceed $570Million towards research for heart disease and stroke with the Start! Program and our website has helped employees of member companies log and track over 6 million miles through 200,000 people who have registered to log those miles.
We are off to a great start with over 1.6 Million unique visitors per year. |
