Fit For Sport's Fitter Families bridges the gap between awareness and change 

Regional Health Authorities (RHAs), Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and Local Authorities (LAs) must now work to convert the nation’s growing awareness of living healthier, more active lives, into actual behavioural change amongst individuals in their communities. It is the primary age children now who will make up the predicted obese population statistic of 2050.

Through its Engagement, Support and Legacy Packages, Fitter Families offers PCTs, RHAs and LAs a cost-effective ready-made solution that will support their achieving National Indicator led healthy weight targets; as well as offering a potentially viable 2012 Olympics health legacy solution.

While campaigns such as Change4Life and 5-a-day have been extremely successful in educating consumers with knowledge about eating healthily and becoming more active, many consumers still don’t know how to translate this into changes within their own lives.  It is this gap between knowing and doing that needs to be bridged if Key National Indicator Targets on healthy weight and greater activity are to be met.

“A significant proportion of the population would love to change their unhealthy habits but can’t or don’t know how to translate that awareness message into actions,” says Dean Horridge, Founder & CEO of Fit for Sport, the UK’s leading Healthy Lifestyles Activity Provider.“If the Government is to influence mass, habitual change, it is vital that it encourages local stakeholders from the public, private and third sectors to deliver quality, sustainable, fun activity programmes.

Using its 18 years of community healthy activity engagement experience, through its parent organization Fit For Sport, Fitter Families’ Legacy Package harnesses the two natural cohesive sources of support in any local community; schools and the family, to deliver continued and fun engagement in the area of healthy, active lifestyles. This will support change particularly in those areas of high deprivation that so often represent the areas of greatest health inequality in any community. 

More than 5,000 schools are already engaged in the company’s two year pilot of the Fitter Schools Challenge and more than 13,000 families are taking part in its Fitter Families Campaign.

Both initiatives are free to sign-up and free for families to take part, which could prove crucial as evidence suggests there is likely to be little, if any, additional money made available for Health Authorities, PCTs and LAs to deliver this. 

Both Fitter Families and Fitter Schools aim to engage and educate children and their families about how easy it is to adopt a healthier lifestyle through small and simple everyday habit changes that are Simple, Achievable and Sustainable (SAS).

“If every school in the UK were doing a Fitter Schools Challenge and every Schools Community was actively engaged in Fitter Families, then the obesity crisis which is predicted to result in  a predominantly obese or overweight population by 2050 could be reversed,” says Horridge.

“Children need to learn from a very young age that what they put in their mouths and how much physical activity they do will directly influence their quality of life in later years. Our programmes, initiatives and campaigns are designed to ensure that children understand the basic principles of healthy eating and active living so as to enable them to can take responsibility for the destination of their own health.

If what they are engaged to do is fun, they will keep on doing it thus making any results sustainable and therefore the results long-term and permanent.”

The premise of the Fitter Families Legacy Package is that the if more of the people are more active and living more healthily for more of the time then the “Obesity Supertanker” predicted to become the social and financial burden for every local community, can first be slowed and then eventually reversed.

That is the Legacy that is Fitter Families!

For more information, please contact Project Manager: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Interested in sponsorship opportunities?  Download our proposal here:
 Fitter Families Marketing Proposal 2010

 Fitter Families Overview