Shape up the Nation

I want to bring your attention to an organization started by a Brown student. Rajiv Kumar, a Brown medical school student co-founded Shape up Rhode Island as a way to encourage exercise and nutrition in the workplace. This statewide exercise and weightloss challenge allows participants to compete on teams and track their weight, exercise hours and pedometer steps over a twelve-week period during the Spring or a eight-week period during the Summer. The sign up fee is minimal and participants feel good about themselves as they lose weight and become active all in an effort to live healthier lives. In its 4th year, Shape Up Rhode Island has helped over 35,000 people lose weight, walk millions of millions and work together to improve their health.

Rajiv has taken this very successful model nationwide with his new organization Shape up the Nation. Shape up the Nation facilitates fitness competitions in the workplace by providing an online wellness platform where participants can track their progress. Shape Up takes care of everything from marketing the competition, registering members, tracking progress, providing motivational materials, rewarding the winners and aggregating the performance of all participants. Shape Up caters to all fitness levels and when employees sign up they can choose which metrics they want to track, including weight loss, exercise minutes, nutrition, smoking cessation and pedometer steps.

The model has proven to be very successful and is now being used by corporations such as CVS/Caremark, UPS and Union Pacific amongst many others.

I encourage you to check out Shape Up and bring it to your workplace if it is not already there!

This model seems to be a great way to get people excited about being active and I think we could start similar competitions in our schools. I remember doing the Presidential Fitness Challenge as a kid and I remember how excited my classmates and I would get about it. We need to implement more fun and friendly competitions with a focus on getting kids to be active and eat healthy. This is what I will be doing, so if you would like to help please contact me.