“We started this fitness challenge with all of our employees,” said Low, medical director of Care Management, Patient Placement Center and Utilization Review.
The department has about 90 employees, and about a third of them decided to participate in the challenge from June 1 to Aug. 31.
Each participant paid $25 to join, and some donated more to the pot to kick things off.
The top winner would be the person with the highest percent weight loss.
Some people worked out every day of the three summer months. That was the second prize. Third prize went to the participant with the highest number of hours exercising in one week.
“It was not meant for people to go out and be crazy exercisers, but it was if you go for a two-hour walk, that counts,” Low said. “It encouraged participants. I did that so people wouldn't lose motivation.”
The department also started a group chat on the social media application WhatsApp. After working out, each participant was asked to share an image of their watch or exercise app or whatever they used to track time.
“Some people would just send an attachment picture of the exercise on the screen at the gym within 30 minutes,” Low said. They had to send that plus a “Sweaty Selfie” to the group chat to get credit for exercise.
In order for it to count, participants had to complete at least 30 minutes of low-intensity exercise. A walk would count if it was at least 30 minutes long. Or they could do 15 minutes of a super-high intensity class.
The fun part of the summer challenge was a surprise.
“This group chat that we started with the Sweaty Selfies became like a huge morale booster and motivator for the group,” Low said. “Even the people who aren't exercising every single day or who haven't been super disciplined, they still chimed in and encouraged others.
“People are sharing recipes,” she added. “They're sharing pictures of their kids. They're sharing pictures of exercising with their family. They're sharing pictures of their plants. We have gardeners in the group.”
The department—and the employees— discovered that some people in the groups had common interests. Those gardeners, for example, started talking about attending plant expos together.
“Before that, there were a lot of people on the chat who didn't work together or know each other,” Low said.
“It's been a really kind of cool social experiment.” Weight loss was the initial idea behind the challenge, but Low wanted to get people to create healthy habits and lifestyle changes.
“My idea was, ‘It's OK if you don't lose weight—the goal is to get outside and be active,’” Low said. “We've all spent the last two years not being as active as we would like to be. So, let’s be active.
“We have people who are going for walks at lunchtime and sending pictures, they're walking in the hospital,” she said. “They have routes planned out where they walk laps in the hospital and through the buildings at lunchtime.”
The fitness challenge wasn’t just for the staff.
“It was for us too—for me and for the leadership team,” Low said. “COVID was hard. I feel like depression rates are higher. And mental health is a super-important thing.
“I firmly believe that exercise and activity levels correlate with mental health,” she said. “The more active we are, the more we exercise, the more we spend time outside, the happier we are in general.”
Many of the participants want to do the challenge again. Low, a fan of gathering data, points out it was a lot of work collecting and tracking all the times and Sweaty Selfies. She might need help doing it again, she joked.
“They're already talking about doing something over the holidays,” Low said.
