Ride for Life

We did it! Hundred miles around serene Cayuga lake to raise awareness of AIDS and to raise funds for Southern Tier AIDS Program for continued prevention and support services. It was a wonderful ride.

I woke up at five on Saturday morning and zipped down Buffalo Street after a quick breakfast, my little LEDs shining in the dark and scaring a skunk who was puttering around minding its own business. Arrived to Stewart Park to wait for the ride to begin as the sky lightened, met friends with whom I’d be sharing the road. Watched more than 350 riders gather together. Before we were sent off, we were touchingly reminded of the purpose of the AIDS Ride for Life – the stories yet to be told, the lives yet to be saved, and the dreams yet to be realized.

Can’t quite describe the feelings I had at that moment. I think it was a mixture of sadness, joy and anticipation. I thought of Freddie Mercury and the songs he still kept on recording just days before his death. I thought of the book “Wisdom of Whores” I read last year, the theoretical ease and the practical difficulties of preventing HIV infections. I looked at people around me and I was glad to be one of them. They all cared.

Preparing for the ride

And then we started riding and I came back to the present moment and just enjoyed the cool morning air and the determined pedaling. I had tested the waters one week earlier on a 57-mile ride to Aurora and back, so I knew that the first hills would be steep and long, but not too bad. Pretty soon (well, after 1,5 hours) we were at King Ferry Winery, the first pit stop at 18-mile mark. Munched some protein-filled oatmeal with nuts and pumpkin seeds, filled my water bottle, chatted with friends, and soon we took off again.

Weather was absolutely perfect, half-cloudy, not too hot, not too cold. We sped past the second pit stop thinking that we would easily make it to the opposite end of the lake before having to stop. This theory would have held if I hadn’t started losing air from my backtire around 40-mile mark. It wasn’t a flat, but definitely a little bit of leakage was happening. Since it was less than ten miles to Verdi Signs pit stop, I wanted just to go as far as I could, and change the tube there with proper tools. (I had a spare tube and tire levers with me, but I had forgotten a wrench! My bike’s old-fashioned, it has real bolts to keep the tires on.) Well, had to stop to pump more air in a couple of times, but arrived to Verdi Signs without losing too much time on the way. And besides, it’s a ride, not a race.

Thanks to the repair crew, I soon had a new tube in and full of air. We continued through a lovely drumlin area and reached Seneca Falls after noon, having ridden 60 miles. I wasn’t feeling too tired, but definitely hungry. Enjoyed a good lunch with the team and got back on the bikes.

The 40 miles that we had left went by surprisingly fast. The wind that had been against us during the first half of the journey was now on our side (or, behind our backs). What’s more, the lovely volunteers had written and drawn encouraging messages on the road shoulder. We stopped once to fill our bottles and grab a handful of grapes before the last leg. Having eaten tons during the day, I actually felt quite energetic as we approached Ithaca. Crossing the finish line at Cass Park was awesome: a big crowd of people was there waving, cheering and applauding. Then we just relaxed and basked in the afternoon sun. After five we gathered for the victory ride through downtown to Stewart Park, where we had a nice dinner and celebrated the accomplishments.

Victory Ride!

The ride raised over $216,000. It’s an incredible sum and will go to a great cause. What’s more, the effect on raising AIDS awareness and strengthening people’s self-confidence goes even longer way. For me, 80 miles was the longest distance I’ve biked before this. It was wonderful to see that I could do it, and I didn’t even feel sore afterwards! And it was wonderful to see other people feel the same awe about themselves. Plus all the wonderful volunteers who took care of feeding and hydrating us and keeping us safe and smiling.

One girl actually rode a penny-farthing for 50 miles. Now, that’s a really amazing achievement!

Team Felicia – thanks everyone, you are wicked awesome!

The AIDS Ride is not a unique fundraising effort here, although it’s perhaps the largest event in terms of duration and organizing. There’s something going on almost every weekend. For example, in August, women swam one mile across Cayuga Lake to raise funds for hospice care. Tomorrow, there’s a Food Justice Summit walkathon (5 miles) with the aim to build a sustainable food system. Community is activated to do good voluntarily, and have fun and be physically active at the same time.

We have similar things in Finland too, but somehow I’ve never managed to hear of them, and I think they tend to be smaller scale. For example, there was a “Kävele naiselle ammatti” (“walk an occupation for a woman”) event in Tampere two weeks ago. Perhaps Pirkan Kierros could be re-focused as a charity event? (Could be that some of the money is already being donated somewhere, but if that’s the case, they’re not really advertising it.) Let me know which events you know of!

So now I’m listening to Queen’s last album, Made in Heaven, and thinking how people in welfare nations are more likely to engage in voluntary work, because they are safe and secure and can spare their time and resources on helping others. When a mind is not occupied with basic survival, it can reach out to the world and respect every life as valuable.

This year has been one hell of a ride so far. Ups and downs, but much more ups than downs. It’s a beautiful world that we have, and beautiful people in it. Let’s strive to make it even better.

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SNEB 2012

I attended the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior Annual Conference in Washington DC July 13-17. This is a brief summary about the conference in general and the main themes that stuck with me, even two months after the conference. The summary of the conference proceedings and many of the presentations are available here.

The garden behind the hotel was a place for quiet, relaxing moments.

As a sidenote: it’s somewhat embarrassing how it’s taken me ages to get this done. Reuniting with my significant other and having a summer vacation right after the conference was wonderful, but it caused this to get stuck midway in the priority pile. Still, better late than never.

Conference

Almost 600 people participated in the conference this year, making the attendance the highest in the past ten years. I might be biased, but I’m inclined to think that one of the reasons was the current president, no other than Brian Wansink. He has the skill to breathe energy and enthusiasm into anything he touches. And based on the talks I had with various conference attendees, the research that Food & Brand Lab does is generally considered not only quirky, but very interesting, original and practically useful as well.

Interest in practical usefulness was apparent in the audience demographics: in addition to researchers, a lot of dieticians, cooperative extension people, and health promotion program planners were present. Exhibition booths included potato and wheat promoters, developers of engaging educational materials, cancer researchers and so on.

Exposing kids to oranges and cantaloupes!

All in all, everyone’s focus was on practical and actionable things in nutrition education and behavior change. The overall theme of the conference was synergy, which encouraged people to find ways to collaborate and benefit from each other’s expertise. I think that the most inspiring thing for me was just talking with all sorts of people and feeling the empathy, enthusiasm, and the drive to learn and to make real changes. Feeling that others genuinely cared about people’s well-being and wanted to make a difference.

Community partnerships

Building partnerships was the focus of several sessions and talks. Not only partnerships between researchers and health professionals, but engaging the entire community: universities, schools, community organizations; researchers, students, activists, educators, parents, farmers, daycare centers, chefs, churches… the list goes on. Two centers, one from west and one from east coast, presented their visions and modes of operation.

• Center for Nutrition and Activity Promotion bridges disciplines to help people eat healthier and be more active.
• Center for Health & Risk Communication works with communities to promote health and social justice.

Both centers started by collecting the resources that were already available and expanded from that. They develop, implement, and evaluate health promoting services, using a lot of students to do the practical work. This is great for everyone: students get practical experience and a taste for civic engagement, researchers are able to focus on coordinating and evaluating, and community members are approached from many directions.

I participated in an exercise to create a network of partners in local community to achieve the objective of a given project. We were encouraged to think outside the box to identify organizations and companies that could be involved, such as grocery stores, environmental activists and so on.

It would be really great to get students more involved in Finland as well, to create actual health promotion projects. Small-scale, of course (at least at first), but it would have been awesome to do something real instead of just writing essays when I was a student.

Simple and cheap

One of the recurring themes was the need for simple and cheap tools to promote healthy choices, as well as the need for healthy choices themselves to be simple and cheap. The first person to talk about this was Sam Kass, the White House chef and advisor in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, which has the goal to reverse childhood obesity. One of the aims is to give parents easy, understandable tools that help them make healthy choices for their kids.

Another example that stuck in my mind was Leon T. Andrews’ “Healthy Cities for a Healthy Future” talk where he showed a series of pictures of a gradual transformation of a cross-section in a city: starting from a barren scene with no sidewalks or biking lanes, ending with a charming pedestrian-friendly cross-section with trees, flower beds, wide sidewalks, crosswalks, clear traffic signs and an entire street devoted to pedestrians. The point was that not everything has to be done at once, it can start from just adding a crosswalk and pedestrian traffic lights, and slowly become so that the entire environment encourages walking and biking instead of driving.

Besides, it makes sense to keep children active and give them nutritious food.

• Healthy kids = better students
• Better students = healthy communities
• Healthy communities = healthy future

The advantages of synergy and partnerships are clear from this perspective as well: what is simple and cheap for one person can be very difficult and expensive for another. That’s why it is crucially important to find the right person to work with. Sharing tips, tricks, experiences, and best practices is equally important. That’s really what education is also about. Technology can help a lot if it’s done right for the target group’s needs and fits into existing routines reasonably well.

Leon T. Andrews is from ChangeLab Solutions, who have collected lots of tools and policies on their website. For example, they have a toolkit for advocates who want to work with city planners to create healthier cities. Maybe something like this could be made more interactive to make it easier for ordinary people to figure out some basic things they could also do to help a little?

International perspective

I met several other international participants in an evening reception and in the International Division meeting. No one else from Europe, though. There was a wonderful woman from Argentina who had started her own initiative to develop educational materials and programs for schools to promote healthier eating and physical activity. She was extremely interested in how to leverage technology to lessen the need for people to travel around teaching, but the problem in Argentina is that schools don’t usually have Internet connections or computers for children. We came to a conclusion that the best way to start would be to develop a DVD for those schools which at least have computers on-site.

Other interesting perspectives included an energetic South Korean woman’s story of the country’s journey of advancing from malnourishment and poverty after the Korean war to being the 11th strongest economy in the world, and a woman from New Zealand who was doing her PhD in food literacy and how to measure it. Food policies in different countries and the sustainability of the entire food systems were also discussed critically.

And I just love hearing different accents from around the world!

Talking about weight

Rebecca Puhl from Yale Rudd Center and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer from University of Minnesota made compelling cases against dieting and weight stigma. Puhl presented research results that demonstrated how obese children are 63% more likely to be bullied, largely because overweight characters are always portrayed in a negative way in children’s media. It’s an awfully big problem because weight-based teasing easily leads to social isolation, lower performance at school, depression or anxiety, and less physical activity. Also, teachers and parents look at obese children more negatively. All this obviously results in increased emotional eating, which makes the original problem worse, which leads into more emotional eating and… you get the picture.

Neumark-Sztainer talked about dieting in adolescence and presented findings from longitudinal studies which showed that dieting predicted binge eating. Stopping a diet was not associated with greater weight gain than persistent dieting. So, diets don’t really work. Instead, I think that helping people form new small habits is the way to go. Figure out what the person can do and how s/he could do it.

We need to be able to communicate with anyone in a sensitive, respectful manner. Health at Every Size approach makes a lot of sense, especially since exercise really should be fun, stress-relieving, energizing activity instead of a dreary obligation.

My posters & technology

I presented two posters about predictors of adherence and water intake advice. Dieticians were more interested in water, researchers more in adherence. I discussed the importance of self-efficacy and mental well-being with a couple of people and got a reference to Ellyn Satter’s Eating Competence approach, which focuses on two aspects in healthy eating, which make a lot of sense:

• The permission to choose enjoyable food and eat it in satisfying amounts.
• The discipline to have regular and reliable meals and snacks and to pay attention when eating them.

Technology had a relatively small role amidst policies, education programs, partnerships and environmental influences. That is perfectly fine, I think. Nevertheless, a couple of posters focused on mobile applications and tablet games aimed for children. There was also a session about enhancing your presence in social media – how to best use Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs. It seems to be pretty essential nowadays to have social media presence, but sometimes I wonder how fragmented our time (at least mine) becomes when we start following all these things.

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Recreation

It was so hot that I couldn’t really spend a lot of time outside without melting into a puddle. Nevertheless, we managed to get some walks in. The main attraction nearby was the National Zoo, which held animals from almost all parts of the world. Still, it just doesn’t feel quite right to keep living things imprisoned, even though giant pandas would probably be extinct without zoos by now. What affected me the most was seeing gorillas that were munching on snacks looking bored, orangutans trying to make their beds more comfortable by fluffing up the pile of hay, and other primates leading quiet family lives. Those guys looked just like humans, and I wondered why I was on this side of the bars and they on the other side.

Father’s taking a nap while mother’s nursing the baby.

We also went to see an eating disorder play called “Breaking Up With ED” with a colleague. ED is this nasty fellow who barges in uninvited and generally makes everyone miserable. The play was touching and funny, with monologues from various different characters, either suffering from eating disorders themselves or watching someone else’s suffering.

Next year

Next year’s conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, the healthiest and greenest city in the United States. Apparently, the founders of Portland were cunning fellows who wanted to attract more businesses, so they decided to make downtown blocks only half of the length of standard city blocks. As a result, the city is very pedestrian-friendly.

Guilt of a Consumer

I scribbled these paragraphs a couple of weeks ago when I was sitting in a plane and looking down to the vast blue ocean, mostly covered with clouds. I remember wondering what kinds of living beings swam under the glimmering waves, and whether pollutants in their environment were making them sick. I could try to rationalize my travelling, but I couldn’t deny being part of the problem.

What can change the nature of a man? Love or guilt, perhaps. This is about both of them.

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I’m flying across Atlantic once more. My soul, which has trouble with keeping up with the speed, is growing weary of it. But I felt that the ties, some of them bound by blood and others by friendship, compelled me to visit Finland in the summer. And oh, the light skies, the clear lakes, and the sweet flavor of berries. Goose berries, blueberries, a couple of swims, walks and talks.

Still, those are sort of selfish reasons. I know I’m not practising what I preach in every domain of life. What if Facebook’s “Places I’ve visited” map also included the amounts of CO2 emissions produced by the journey? What if people, while telling about their vacation trips, would also recite the number of trees that would need to be planted to offset the harm done to the environment, or the volume of the arctic ice that melted as a result?

Most estimates state that a single trans-Atlantic  flight produces roughly an equal amount of CO2 emissions as driving an average car – non-stop – for a year. I’m really sorry, polar bears.

I can certainly explain away and rationalize my travels, but still – my sister only visited Finland once during her exchange year in France. And she survived. Afterwards I learned that she certainly wasn’t happy all the time, but she grew a lot during that year.

The person who I will miss the most during the rest of this year gave me a book to read on the journey. It’s Alissa Quart’s book about brands among youth, published ten years ago. I’m afraid it’s still an accurate portrayal of the lifestyle of a major part of youth in USA (perhaps not as much in Ithaca). In summary, the picture that Quart paints depicts teenagers and kids as willing slaves to the companies that happily exploit them to market their products more effectively.

In one chapter, she talks about Breakfast Club, a youth movie made in 1985 (I’ve actually seen it too when I was a teenager, and I admit that I liked it). It is similar to other youth movies in the 70s and 80s: it’s about loneliness and not fitting in, and ultimately about strengthening own personal identity. Being your own unique person.

In contrast, youth movies nowadays seem to be only about fitting in into the mainstream. People need to brand themselves with clothes, makeup, shopping, and gigantic parties. These movies promote herd mentality. Not to mention that the expensive brands usually originate from sweatshops in Asia where workers need to work around the clock to be able to feed themselves.

Why do we consume instead of creating or enjoying? Why do we seek our self-worth through possessions and self-enhancement through dressing up and modifying our bodies?

Again, it’s the environment that we live in. Advertisements, television, magazines, shops, other people’s Facebook status updates and vacation photos. They all shout that we should strive to not look natural or casual, and that we must travel (and especially take photos!) around the world so that we’re not considered boring.

Travel can certainly broaden the mind, but we need to take the time to truly understand the local people and nature. Every place has a history and life of its own. It should be given the appreciation it deserves.