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Planned Giving

Executive Director's Viewpoint:

As we gain weight, the finger is usually pointed at the food and the fat side of the problem. We believe a change in diet is all that is needed to become healthy. You know the answers: Eat fewer calories than you burn; eat less fat, less protein, and fewer carbohydrates and drink more water. Or at a different level, it's this diet, that diet, a grapefruit diet, an old diet, or whatever diet works.

The problem with this approach is that it's like doing less evil in the hope that you'll produce more good. If you're like me, you've quickly realized that eliminating murder, assault, embezzlement, and theft from your behavior hasn't necessarily made you a better person-- or even likeable--let alone a hero or a saint. No, while eliminating evil is a good thing, exercising one’s good will is also necessary both for becoming a good person and for performing good deeds.

So what does this comment on morality have to do with losing weight and what does it have to do with parks? The flip side of diet is exercise. A reasonable diet can keep you from becoming sick or obese, but only exercise can make you fit and healthy. And this applies to both sexes, all ages, people who already have chronic diseases, thin people and fat people.

Health guidelines used to recommend one half hour of exercise every day to achieve good health. But the latest recommendation is now one full hour of exercise! You may laugh and dismiss this goal as utterly ridiculous, especially given the office-bound, car-bound, scheduled nature of your life. But at its core, the message is fundamental to your health, your longevity, and enjoying your life. You may rationalize that one hour of exercise is unreasonable or simply unachievable but in general, you will lose your health at a rate governed by your lack of exercise. Ultimately, on average, we're talking about the difference between being unhealthy and dying in your fifties or sixties, and being healthy and living vibrantly into your eighties or nineties. We're talking about feeling good while living longer, and about spending a smaller proportion of your money and time on traditional health care.

Scheduling time at the gym is one way of getting exercise. So is hiring a personal trainer, or creating a home exercise program. Yet the natural way, the way that can work for most anyone, is to establish and maintain an active everyday recreational life in parallel to your career and family. Simply considering active recreation as equivalent in value to planning a career move or planning your daily meals will help establish exercise into your daily life. This simple change in perspective puts you well on the way to living a healthy life, to maintaining a reasonable weight given your own genetics, and to feeling good.

As a public body, the American physique is morbidly obese. It's killing us because we eat too much and exercise virtually not at all. The public answer to this state of chronic disease has been hospitals, health insurance, cancer research, and the endless medical desire to eradicate illness, to prevent cancer, to eliminate pain, to prevent death. Once again, we have the elimination of evil as the goal, rather than increasing the amount of good.

Doctors, medical researchers, hospitals, emergency rooms, surgery, and pharmaceuticals all have their place, but none can substitute for simple exercise. The gargantuan cost of modern medicine achieves diminishing returns when spending billions of dollars on the last years of ones life, and negligible and arguable returns when treating those who have passively allowed their bodies to deteriorate. Thus, there must be better public investments in public health.

One investment that may not seem obvious is public parks. Parks enable public exercise. Parks enable public health. And more intense uses of parks, such as swimming pools, playgrounds, and ball fields enable more intense public health. But even the traditional, natural, open-space park provides an attractive place in which to walk, a place to walk to, and at times a place to walk through. The daily use of a park changes what was once unattainable “exercise” into active recreation. But the end result in the individual is the same: improved quality of life and improved health.

For the future, understanding the link between public health and physical activity enabled through parks is essential. Ultimately, public health dollars must flow into parks, so that parks can become the sites for social exercise through recreation, physical rehabilitation, and physical maintenance. Developing metrics that demonstrate the link between parks and public health is one of the first challenges. Someday, this link will drive healthcare policy, insurance policy, city planning, and political will.

But for now, on a personal level, find a nearby park and incorporate it into your life. I expect you'll lose weight, improve muscle tone, prevent illness, think clearer, spend more time with your family and friends, be happier and feel better.