Global Obesity - Are Fitness & Wellness Leaders Mindsets Part Of The Problem ?

I was watching the video below of Sir Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms. It led me to draw some parallels between his views on needed changes in thinking around a broken approach to education and a similar situation regarding wellness and fitness. If you read my posts before, you know I like to write about the future and its promise. I believe the fitness and wellness industries must play an important role in that future. You see we increasingly hear of crises we face every day as nations and as humans. There is the  recent economic crisis and the growing climate crises. We also know we face a global health crisis and it isn't getting better; despite all of the growth of the fitness and wellness business our world is getting less well. The World Health Organization predicts there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world by 2015 and more than 700 million of them will be obese. Something, therefore, isn't working and this is what Robinson's video alludes to in general about education. The problem is fundamental: but why ?

The cost of providing health care now and increasingly in the future is bankrupting our economies; this is irrefutable and the rise of the global poor is only exacerbating the situation as obesity rears its head across the world. I won't even touch upon the diminished quality of life factors and impact on productivity.

This is a dilemma. We all want progress but we must acknowledge the consequences this progress creates. Interestingly the origins of all of these significant crises are the same. These challenges go unsolved because of their source. To change requires doing things differently; to innovate fundamentally; to change how we educate, manufacture, govern, and in the case of the fitness and wellness industry, help people be well. You see the way its being done now does not work - the evidence is undeniable.

Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy. It requires challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for any reform is the tyranny of common sense. Things that people think, "Well, it can't be done another way because that's the way it's done." One of my favorite quotes is that of Daniel Boorstin who observed, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. And therefore the fundamental barriers to progress in this regard are mostly the leaders of the very institutions created to forward their initial cause. Therefore I'd ask, is our industry, fitness and wellness, part of the globesity problem ? Is our thinking getting in the way of the solutions ?

What do you think ? Is the Fitness Industry , the Wellness Industry, contributing to the global obesity problem ? Why or why not ? Contact me, Bryan O'Rourke and share your views on this please and watch the video below for perspectives on how irrelevant mind sets are THE problem for education. The parallels are obvious to me - are they to you ?