Keep America Active brings wellness to winter

Welcome! To Keep America Active
January 8, 2018

Being Well at Yale is sponsoring their seventh annual online wellness challenge, Keep America Active! The new challenge encourages participants to record healthy behaviors for points. It also includes inspiration through articles, daily tips, delicious recipes, and other fun features like Thrive Thursday bonus challenges.

Yale faculty, staff, graduate, and professional students can participate in this 6-week online wellness tour. Participants will go from state to state, visiting America the beautiful.

The Keep America Active goal is to log 25+ points per week by recording one or more of these health behaviors:

  • exercise minutes or steps
  • daily gratitude
  • no sugar-sweetened beverages

Wondering where you can get your exercise minutes or steps in the winter? 

While the weather outside may be frightful, walking indoors can be delightful! Some buildings around Yale campus make for good indoor walking and stair climbing, maybe even yours! Going on museum or building tours is another great option.  Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, scheduling walking meetings when possible, and always remembering to take stretch breaks are other ways to add more activity to your day. After work or on the weekends, a local mall makes a great place to meet up with a friend or two and walk indoors when it’s too cold to be outside. 

What are you grateful for today? 

Practicing gratitude can happen in a variety of ways, many of which only require taking a few moments out of your day. The practice of gratitude is personal and can be expressed or shared with others, or kept private - it’s up to you. Some simple suggestions are: keeping a gratitude list or journal in a notebook or even on your phone, creating an appreciation board at work or home, writing thank you notes or emails, and thinking of something or someone you’re grateful for while taking a few deep breaths.

Stuck on the sweet stuff? 

Sugar has been called the new tobacco but unlike tobacco, sugar is added to almost every kind of processed food and beverage making it difficult to avoid. This challenge presents a good opportunity to voluntarily reduce your sugar intake by eliminating sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, artificially sweetened juices, sugar-laden lattes and tempting teas. Start by taking note of how many sugar-sweetened beverages you drink a day, including coffee, tea, soda and sports drinks. Try cutting back on one each day, gradually reducing the number to none. Try your tea or coffee without sugar and you may discover new or exotic flavors long forgotten!  Get creative and infuse your water bottle with fresh fruit and herbs.

Registration opens Monday January 22. That means it’s time to sign up and form or join a team of 3-8 people. Participants can also choose to go it alone, if they like. The challenge begins on February 5, when participants can start logging activity and recording their healthy habits. February 12 is the deadline to join or form a team. And the challenge ends on March 18, though participants can still go in and backlog activity until March 20. 

Log on the Go! Yes, there’s an app for that! Participants can quickly log activities on their mobile device. Download the app for iPhone® or Android™ by searching Keep America Active in the App Store or Google Play. 

To learn more, read the FAQ.  Send questions to beingwell@yale.edu or call 436-8270.