This morning I read a Tweet from my friend Ben that one in four UK children leave primary school obese.
Did I just hear that right on @BBCr4today? “One in four UK children leave primary school obese”?!
— Ben Saunders (@polarben) October 21, 2015
I replied mentioning my long held idea of a very simple website called Eat Less Run More.
@polarben @BBCr4today time to launch the “Eat Less, Run More” website I’ve been planning for years!
— Alastair Humphreys (@Al_Humphreys) October 21, 2015
My old coach, Andy, seconded the idea.
@Al_Humphreys @polarben @BBCr4today launch it and I will support it- that is a horrendous statistic!!
— Andy McKenzie (@IronMacFitness) October 21, 2015
Then I went to the gym, as usual. But today I took a pencil and a piece of paper with me. In my rests between exercises I wrote some stuff, came home and published it.
And so here is my new website: Eat Less Run More.
It’s very simple. In fact you don’t really need to do anything more than act on those four words to significantly change your weight and health.
It’s brief and simplistic. I am not an expert. If there’s any way you’d like to help improve it, that would be great. Text amendments, design improvements, spreading the word: anything would be appreciated!
Suggestions:
– get a proper domain name for it (looks like eatlessrunmore.com is being held by squatters)
– given the opening statement is about kids, how about a section on child specific fitness activities?
Great idea though (he says as he guiltily eats a Mars bar… :- )
Cheers!
It’s just not that simple. You need to look at the food first. An energetic healthy child will follow. Obese people aren’t fat because they eat too much and move to little. They eat a lot and are sedentary because they are obese.
I know it’s not that simple. But making something ‘that’ simple is always the best way to begin, to overcome inertia. And I did focus on the food first.
Andrew,
“Obese people aren’t fat because they eat too much and move too little”? Really? That sounds like exactly the reason to me.
The website is a great idea. I love that it is simple, to the point and written in a friendly way. However, I hated PhysEd in school and grew up in a small Australian country town where exercise meant “cricket or football”. The sports-stars were generally the town bullies and one of the few ways to avoid being a victim of bullying was to be good at these sports – if you couldn’t do that, your life was hell. Unsurprisingly, for a long time I thought I hated exercise…. then at University I discovered cycling as a means of transport, fell in love and have been active and as fit as a fiddle ever since. It seems to me that a lot of people have negative ideas attached to exercise – they believe exercise has to be through an organised sport or in a gym or if it isn’t painful and unpleasant it mustn’t really be exercise. I’d love to see more encouragement on your site about how exercise should something fun, something which makes life more joyful, something you may not even notice is making you more healthy because you are so busy enjoying it. In a way that is what I see in your microadventures work – a love for the outdoors that is open to anybody, not just hardbodied ex-military men. I’m sorry for the poorly composed message, I hope you get the jist of what I’m saying – I’m writing this in a bit of a rush in my pajamas after breakfast and I need to shower and get out for a ride with my son!
All very good points – thank you! (I was very much like you too until discovering cycling at university).
Well said Jarrod, sport should be promoted as fun and not as something you HAVE to do, but do because you want to! Fun is the name of the game. And good on you Alistair for taking the initiative to set this website up – I wish you every success!
The idea is really simple but apparently people can’t manage to apply it in the real life also because, quoting Tom Allen, :”…if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s resisting change.” The western typical city is made to let us eat junk food at whatever time of the day and the night and to keep us on a chair in front of a screen whenever we aren’t doing the abovementioned action. The hardest thing is to begin, once you start and feel the benefits then probably you won’t go back, that’s at least what happened to me personally when I started biking to the office instead of going by bus.
About the website, the only suggestion I have is that you could add references to the data you mention, you know, for sake of completeness!
Hi Alister.
I totally support your impulse here – I agree that childhood obesity needs to be addressed. But I think the “run more” part of your message has been disproven by science over and over again. Exercise is important for lots of reasons, but it’s not a weight loss strategy. I would encourage you to watch this video by a very well respected Canadian doctor, who summarizes this science: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x7FK8noIc5I
Those “annoying” popups keep coming up every single time I access the website. I think you should find a way that they recognise that the person is not a new visitor and if that’s not possible only have them turned on some of the time, not all of the time.
Hi Jamie,
That is annoying. It’s not supposed to do that. Sorry!
My suggestion is to turn the entire website into a single short motivational video, made for kids, presented by you. You have already written the script!
*adds to To Do List…*