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some strangeness from across the pond...
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/overweight-people-could-face-benefit-cuts-043203845.html#Cf62SU5
Basically, a central council area in London is trying to reduce obesity figures by linking the exercise people do to benefits that they receive, if they are on benefits (so like, if you're fat and on welfare you can only keep your welfare if you prove that you go to the gym regularly, and the gym membership would be prescribed by your doctor)
What they're not doing is taking steps to make real food affordable to regular people, doling out free healthy family budget cooking lessons, controlling fast food locations per council area or putting restrictions on advertising focused toward benefit receiving demographics in the area.
Hard not to shake your head at how they came up with this, though I do think that having local council (think YMCA) gym memberships available on prescription from a doctor to reduce / eliminate the cost is a nice idea - but I also don't think that people on benefits are also people that are likely to go to, enjoy and use a gym? You can't work, but you can go to the gym? Doesn't make sense to me...
Chronically hilarious - you'll split your stitches!
I wrote a book! Bucket list CHECK!
Re: some strangeness from across the pond...
I'm not sure where you get the idea that people who are on benefits don't want to work out or be healthy.
I'm on benefits right now, and I would love to be able to afford a gym membership. As it stands, I cancelled my membership when I couldn't afford it, and exercise a few times a week with a dvd.
"you can't work but you can go to they gym?"
That sounds kind of like you're saying that if you can't find a job, you must be too lazy to do anything.
I'm saying that if you are on benefits because you cannot physically work, it does not make sense to me that you can go to the gym and work out.
How could you get to the gym, do a work out and then get back home, but be too ill or invalid to do any sort of paid work?
Chronically hilarious - you'll split your stitches!
I wrote a book! Bucket list CHECK!
http://notesfortheirtherapist.blogspot.co.uk
Huh? Does the UK only give out welfare to people physically incapable of working or something? Or am I just misunderstanding something here?
Plenty of people (in the US, anyway..) receive government assistance because they simply cannot find work or are underemployed and aren't making a living wage for themselves/their family. That has nothing to do with inability to physically work, which is generally covered under different disability-specific programs entirely, if I understand our system correctly.
I'm all about reforming entitlement policies for a lot of reasons and in a lot of ways but I can think of SO many scenarios where this is a bad idea. What if you have some kind of condition where your exercise is limited or should be monitored carefully (heart condition, etc). What if you lived quite a distance from their council gym and would have no transportation or might have to pay a significant amount of your budget for transportation? What if you were impoverished because the main breadwinner in the house was ill or disabled and you were their primary caregiver? Respite care for someone disabled is not necessarily free or convenient to being able to go to the gym. What if your council gym was in a really bad area of town you were frightened to enter? There is a gym here in town I wouldn't go near in the daylight much less at 5am or 7pm when might be the only time some people might go.
Good intentions bad execution. I definitely like the idea of nutrition education as an expenditure and perhaps some shopping education if you are going to spend anything at all. There is a local gym that offers a weight loss nutrition program and part of the program is field trips to the grocery store to go over label reading and how to shop economically but healthy. Also they go out to a restaurant and discuss how to find healthier menu options and hidden calories. There are some other things they do but these are the most unique to other programs I've seen around here. They have some kind of crazy high long term weight loss success rate.
No, the benefit system here is a major public issue - instances of benefit theft and fraud are in the news constantly. Even David Cameron recently came out with cuts to benefit systems stating that it is unfair that people on benefits are living better than those working to support them - huge, huge issues over here.
From what I understand from this particular issue is that the gym memberships being tied to receiving benefits are for those on disability benefits ie: physically incapable of working. So, you cannot physically work, but you can go to the gym to work out.
Benefit theft and fraud is such a hot spot issue here (and for good reason, the stories in the news and from even friends makes you want to beat your head against a wall!) that this is being seen as another great thing about being on benefits - free gym membership! You don't have to work for that luxury like the rest of us, or even make time around your work schedule to do it like the rest of us. So giving someone benefits because they can't work because of say, a shoulder injury, when there are thousands of jobs up for grabs in the UK that don't require extensive use of your shoulder but you stay on benefits because you make MORE money on benefits than you would working - and now you get to go enjoy the gym or the pool too.
There is ZERO motivation here to get people off of benefits and back into work. This is just making that problem even worse, and making the working public even more angry.
My friend's sister has a Masters degree from Cambridge, but is on benefits because she is a single mother to a 5 year old. She has free housing, and cannot be relocated from that housing because it is now her right to be established there. She was offered a job in her field, environmental conservation, but turned it down because she would make too much money and lose her council housing. So she claims that she cannot work because she has to care for her child, receives a free council house (to herself - no roomates, even though that's the norm in London), childcare subsidy, jobseekers allowance (not contribution based), council tax benefit and an entire host of other benefits that pay her bills and afford her vacations to Spain and Thailand - while her mother looks after her daughter at their family estate in Wales. And she does work, occasionally, but for cash - so she doesn't lose her benefits.
But it's okay, because she's a "free spirit" and doesn't "believe" in things like property ownership - ownership of land should apparently be a human right.
These are the things you hear about here every day in regard to benefits. For her to now be able to get a free gym membership for her local council gym which will also most likely include a free child care facility for her to go work out... I just can't. She has zero motivation to support herself, and "solutions" like this just make it worse.
Chronically hilarious - you'll split your stitches!
I wrote a book! Bucket list CHECK!
http://notesfortheirtherapist.blogspot.co.uk