About the Fitness, Food and Friends Project
The project ‘Fitness, Food and Friends’ was designed as a health and wellbeing delivery over a block of 12 weeks which would be delivered throughout East Lindsey. 12 weeks is generally agreed upon as being the minimum amount of time required to produce behaviour change and hence a positive change in an individual’s overall health.
A session would last for 2 hours and would be approximately half exercise and the other half food, nutrition and/or cooking. The exercises would be tailored to the 50 plus age group and would often incorporate seated and standing exercises. Being aware that many of these people may not have exercised before and also are likely to have health problems that would mean taking things gradually.
The 12-week block delivery topics were not set in stone but left open to get the participants ideas. However, we would make sure we covered the important topics, such as arthritis, diabetes, stress & anxiety, and mental health tips.
So, if the topic was arthritis, we would talk about this during exercise and explain which exercise will be most helpful for managing the condition. We would then have a chat about overall lifestyle factors linked to arthritis before focusing on nutrition and then would often complete a one-pot cooking session for this same topic.
After being re-commissioned ‘fitness, food and friends’ maintained its exercise and nutrition part but also developed a much wider scope of other topics by hooking up with other partners. This included bringing in topics such as digital skills development, scam awareness, dealing with stress & anxiety, mindfulness & wildlife, and even subjects including local history and completing your family tree.
We also developed more varied activities giving participants opportunity to try new age Boccia and Curling as well as Tai Chi. We also arranged a number of local walks and developing the concept of mindfulness walking to encourage mental wellbeing too.
The Fitness, Food and Friends team have worked closely with TED to create a Toolkit that gives an insight into creating, maintaining and evaluating a project such as this.
