ALMA Secretary, Dr Garry Egger was in the Great Lakes region of NSW recently to help launch Great Health Great Lakes, a preventive health project funded by the Department of Health and Ageing and managed by local Exercise Physiologist and ALMA member, Rick Naylor.

Garry, not content with cutting a ribbon or making a speech, decided that it would be good idea to walk approximately 65km of the local coastline and to encourage as many locals as possible to join him. They responded with enthusiasm to this invitation, with almost 100 people accompanying him at various stages of the walk over three days.

The Great Health Great Lakes project targets adults who are not in the full-time paid workforce, and aims to promote positive changes in behaviour relating to physical activity and nutrition.  “A campaign like this is long overdue.  One of the problems with government health initiatives is that they introduce things that are totally alien to people like going to the gym, where a lot of people feel uncomfortable.  This project focuses on things people are comfortable with like walking,” Dr Egger said.

Although the local organisers provided a magnificent lunch for the first day walkers, catered by Dietitians from the Hunter New England Health Service, they insisted that there was to be “no such thing as a free lunch” – which meant that every person must have walked at least 3 km to qualify for their meal (including the VIPs).  As it turned out, the vast majority of the 60 walkers opted for the longer 15 km walk instead. As Dr Egger addressed the group over lunch, he emphasised and reinforced the importance of long-term behaviour change to improve health outcomes.  He cited his own personal experience with a chronic knee complaint, plus those of many other walkers who reported their struggles with MS, Parkinsons Disease, various cancers, hip and knee replacements, etc as evidence that although the barriers to physical activity are real they can be overcome.

The weekend walks in the Great Lakes represented a small part of Dr Egger’s personal pilgrimage to walk the NSW coastline by the end of 2012. The second and third day of the coastal walks were somewhat more challenging as the walkers were required to traverse headlands and sections of national park that not even the long-term locals had explored.  Collectively, the three days of walking enabled Dr Egger to meet a wide cross-section of people from the Great Lakes community and to exchange perspectives on the distal drivers of modern diseases (whilst avoiding the odd brown snake). “It’s no big deal what I’m doing.  I’m just walking – it’s something for fun.  I think all people over 65 should do this walk,” Dr Egger said.

Lifestyle medicine in action in the Great Lakes – walking the talk.