Focusing on a healthy lifestyle

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Ryan Conroy
  • 31st Fighter Wing Public Affairs
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy --  A healthy eating and living festival was held June 13-14 to help inform and encourage Team Aviano on the benefits of improving everyday diets and remaining active.

With the theme "Shop Healthy! Eat Healthy! Be Healthy!" the Defense Commissary Agency's Lifestyle Festival reinforces the health and wellness goals of the military community.

"We're really looking to advocate to our community to be healthy and a few ways to make it easier to stay healthy," said Kevin Egger, HAWC health promotion coordinator. "It's not just the doctor who keeps you healthy, it's the minutes you spend outside of the doctor's office that we call 'lifespace.' There's 525,000 minutes of the year you spend outside of the doctor's office that we're trying to get you to think about eating healthy, working out and keeping a healthy lifestyle."

The lifestyle festival was a combined effort from DeCA, the Health and Wellness Center, the Exchange and several Team Aviano volunteers. Several activities held throughout the weekend included: A bike swap, bike rodeo, a 5k run, running shoe analysis, farmers market and the initiation of a new healthy eating program dubbed "Reach for the Stars."

To kick off the festival, more than 30 individuals participated in a "Friday the 13th Fun Run 5k" to promote a healthier lifestyle through exercise. To keep with the running theme, a treadmill was placed in the Exchange shoe department on June 14, where HAWC personnel were available to give suggestions and recommendations to customers on proper shoe selection.

The two-day promotional effort served as an introduction to the new "Reach for the Stars" campaign. HAWC personnel are going through more than 70,000 products at the Commissary and placing small yellow stars labeled "HP Approved" on the food choices they deem healthier than the others. Egger hopes this makes it easier for customers to make healthier nutrition-based decisions when shopping.

"We usually get our weight problems from buying the wrong foods and eating too much of it," said Egger. "This is making the healthy choice the simple choice."

In addition to the healthy samples, people were also able to enjoy savings on many produce items, and the Exchange offered sidewalk sales on health and fitness items to enhance shopper's experiences.

"We're trying to change the culture within the Air Force to realize, 'Hey, we can have healthy choices all the time and not just once in a while," said Egger.

This was the first festival of its kind at Aviano, but with the successful turnout this year, Egger is looking to the future and plans to expand the program in the coming years.