Every time we move less and each time we look more like the human characters in the movie "Wall-E" do you remember them? Sedentary and mostly obese.
It is not so complicated to take action and end that relationship between Obesity and hiking, a relationship that has allied against our health and that of our children.
It seems to be difficult for us to understand it, but children and adults need to go outside every day, with only three quarters of an hour outdoors every morning our body is activated, it really "wakes up".
We spend more and more time of our lives between four walls and surrounded by screens, we call it comforts of modern life but in the end they are detrimental to our health although it seems that we don't want to realize or give it the importance it really has.
As minimum, The experts set the limit in 20 minutes a day of contact with nature to organize our biorhythms and that does not alter our sleep or our appetite as it is happening to millions of people these days.
Technology is holding us in closed spaces every time for longer periods of time which is not good for our health. We need to expose ourselves to the sun to organize our circadian cycle and We need to move, get up from the chair.
According to a study by the University of Rochester, spending time every day in natural environments can improve our vitality by 40%, a fact to take into account and even more if we talk about children and the high rates of childhood obesity that are occurring More and more countries.
The daily mile
With this premise: the need for physical activity abroad of children from a school in Scotland was launched "The daily mile".
The idea was from Elain Wyllie when she was still an active teacher, is now retired from teaching and is dedicated to publicize what it is and how more and more centers are joining the "daily mile".
Elain was able to verify among her own students what the statistics reflect on the health status of English children. Almost 40% of British children between 11 and 15 are overweight and one in 10 is obese before they even start school.
English children are in worse physical shape than ever according to the data handled by the authorities and almost all the voices agree that this is due to an excessively sedentary life.
Elain one day in 2012 decided to take his entire class to the park he saw from the classroom window and proposed that they run around him, as an experiment. A trip of a quarter of a mile for 10-year-olds to do was not to ask too much and yet that day not a single student completed the tour.
The next day he took them all back to the park and they repeated the tour and the same day the next day the same ... After a month all Elain's students could go around the park four times, they traveled a mile and that's why it was called “the daily mile. ”
Health is contagious
The first departure of Elain's students was in February, for Holy Week they no longer left alone but with five more classes at school, Before summer it was the whole school that made the daily mile.
What's the trick? That nobody is forced, they are encouraged to run but they can do the tour as they want, it is not sport, it is health; There is no competition, there is fun.
Today there are already more than 600 centers in Scotland and another 200 in England and Wales who have joined “the daily mile”, it has become a good habit to the point that the three Scottish parties included it as a proposal in their electoral program for the last regional elections.
The positive results have not been expected. The overweight rates at Stirling College in Scotland where Elaine worked and where “the daily mile” started have fallen to half the Scottish average. The physical fitness and health of children has improved but also their behavior and academic performance, according to their teachers.
For all this, the University of Stirling has initiated a study in which it intends to measure the real physical, cognitive and emotional benefits of “the daily mile” on the child population of this pioneer center since it is the first initiative in the western world that It has worked to reduce childhood obesity.
Nowadays “the daily mile” is already practiced in schools in Belgium, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands because of the tangible benefits that this idea brings to the children who carry it out.
