Amherst Employee Wellness News Update

There has been much afoot at the Health Department in terms of employee wellness. Here’s a recap and some new announcements:

1. Pedometers: We have distributed almost 400 pedometers to employees of the town and the schools. There are still a few left, so please contact us if you want one (while supplies last!)

2. Habits of Health: Our 44-day stress reduction survey is underway, and all employees who return their completed survey to the Health Department by June 26th will be entered in a drawing for an iPod Nano or a gift certificate for a hot tub soak for two at Elements Spa! If you still want to participate, you must begin the survey this week (we will forgive a few incomplete days).

3. Walking Club: The weekly Tuesday Noontime Walking Club was inaugurated last week, and will continue every Tuesday at noon, rain or shine (with the exception of torrential rain, that is). Meet us at the Main Street entrance of Town Hall (across from Newbury Comics) every Tuesday. The group departs promptly at 12:05 and walks for approximately 30 minutes.

4. Hot Tub and Massage Discounts: The Health Department has coupons for $15 off any service at Elements Spa, including therapeutic massage and hot tub soaks, not to mention the infrared sauna and steamroom. We have a limited number of these coupons, so please email carlsonk@amherstma.gov to request your coupon. Elements also offers an across-the-board discount for town employees, so even without a coupon you can save money while relaxing.

5. Free Fitness Evaluation: Fitness Together of Amherst is offering town and school employees a free fitness evaluation with no obligation for further services. However, if you decide to see a personal trainer at their Main Street facility, you will receive a discount as a town or school employee. Feel free to contact them directly at 413-461-3032.

6. Amherst Employee Wellness Blog: Please visit this blog requently for updates, articles and ideas about fitness, wellness, and stress reduction.

7. Benefits Fair: thank you to everyone who visited our table at the Employee Benefits Fair!

8. More to come! More exciting and healthy initiatives are on their way. Please stay tuned!

As always, feel free to contact us at any time. If you need a BP check, have a question about your medications, nutrition, or stress management, please let us know!

Here’s to your health,

The Amherst Public Health Department

Benefits Fair Follow-up

Thank you to all of the town and school employees who attended this year's Employee Benefits Fair last Wednesday, and a very special thank you to everyone who visited the Health Department's table. It was wonderful to meet so many of you!

The Health Department has just under 100 free pedometers remaining for employees. Please email Keith Carlson at carlsonk@amherstma.gov to request a pedometer today!

Also, May 13th is the last day to begin participating in Habits of Health, our 44-day stress reduction survey. The survey is easy to use, takes approximately 1 minute per day, and if you return it to the Health Department by June 26th, you will be entered in a drawing for an iPod Nano or a gift certificate for a hot tub soak for two at Elements Spa!

The Health Department is sponsoring a walking club on Tuesdays at noon beginning on Tuesday, May 12th. The club will meet--rain or shine--at the Main Street entrance of Town Hall (across from Newbury Comics) at noon every Tuesday. We will wait until 12:05 to leave on our walk, which will meander through the Amherst College campus for approximately 30-40 minutes.

Please take advantage of these opportunities for employee wellness, and also let us know if you have feedback, suggestions, ideas or complaints. We want to hear it all, and we want to know how to meet your wellness needs!

Thanks!

Win an iPod Nano and Decrease Your Stress!

Habits of Health, a 44-day pen-and-paper survey of your personal stress management practices, is now available from the Health Department. Every town and school employee who completes the survey will be automatically entered in a raffle to win fabulous prizes:

• Grand Prize: An iPod Nano
• Second Prize: A one-hour hot-tub soak for two at Elements Spa
• Third Prize: A one-hour hot-tub soak for two at Elements Spa

The deadline to return your completed survey is June 26th, so you must begin your survey no later than May 13th!

So, please email Keith Carlson, RN at carlsonk@amherstma.gov to request a survey today! If there are multiple employees in your department who are interested, Keith will happily send a stack of surveys via interoffice mail!

Want to win that iPod or hot-tub soak? Learn to manage your stress and you may be the lucky winner!

Opportunities for Employee Wellness & Great Prizes! Win an iPod Nano!

The Health Department is planning several initiatives in the interest of employee wellness. Although we will officially launch these initiatives at the Employee Benefits Fairs on April 29th (being held at the Bangs Community Center from 12-2 and at the high school from 2:30-4:30), we encourage any interested employee to contact us any time regarding what's on offer.

The first program is a 44-day self-assessment tool in which participating employees will track the strategies that they utilize to manage stress and increase wellness. By completing this simple survey by June 26th and submitting it to Keith Carlson, the Public Health Nurse at the Amherst Health Department, each employee will be entered in a raffle to win our grand prize---an iPod Nano---or our second and third prizes---a one-hour hot-tub soak for two at Elements Spa!

Additionally, Fitness Together on Main Street in Amherst is offering a free session with a personal trainer for all Amherst employees---whether they work for the schools or the town itself. This session will include body fat %, body measurements, weight, strength test, cardiovascular test, and flexibility test, and each participant will get a detailed print out of all of their results. There will be no pressure to become a client, but a discount will be offered for any town or school employee interested in pursuing training at Fitness Together's Main Street facility.

Finally, the Health Department has 300 free pedometers to distribute to interested employees. These pedometers are easy to use and accurately count the number of steps you take each day. Pedometers are a great way to improve your overall fitness by providing an incentive to walk more, use the stairs if you're able, and keep your body moving. And if enough employees are interested, a weekly lunchtime walking club may be instituted beginning the first week of May!

So, these are some of the ways that the Health Department is addressing the wellness and fitness of Amherst's employees. Please consider taking part in any (or all) of our programs, and let us know if there are other ways in which we can meet your needs.

Happy Spring, and see you at the benefits fairs on April 29th!

Laughter: The Best Medicine

Are you aware that the average child laughs 400 times per day, and the average adult laughs less than 15 times per day? So, what is it about adult life that causes such a dramatic reduction in laughter as we age? And what benefits of laughter are we missing out on if laughter is not a part of our daily life?

Research has clearly demonstrated that laughter has many physiological and psychological benefits. We all know that laughter feels good, but many people don't realize that the positive feeling that you experience from laughter is caused by a measurable increase in the level of endorphins and other "happiness hormones" circulating in your blood stream. Laughter can also lower blood pressure, tighten abdominal muscles, tone blood vessels, oxygenate your cells, and increase lung capacity. Scientific research has also shown that laughter increases the number of infection-fighting cells produced by your immune system, thus boosting your ability to fight infection and illness.

Norman Cousins was the first person to popularize the healing power of laughter with the publication of his famous book, Anatomy of an Illness in which he tells the story of how he taught himself to laugh in order to recover from a debilitating illness.

In 1995, Dr. Madan Kataria of Bombay (Mumbai), India founded Laughter Yoga, a social movement dedicated to bringing the health benefits of laughter to the world. Laughter Yoga uses yogic breathing, rhythmic clapping and specialized laughter exercises to elicit laughter from participants, and it is based on the scientifically proven notion that your body cannot tell the difference between authentic laughter and forced laughter, thus whether your laughter is forced or "real", you still receive all of the physiological benefits described above.

Whether you participate in a Laughter Yoga class, watch funny videos on YouTube, laugh together with friends, or simply sit and laugh in your car while waiting at a red light (give it a try!), laughter has many benefits for your mind and body. However you bring laughter into your life and the lives of others, it will surely improve your sense of well-being and that of those around you.

They say that laughter is the best medicine, and perhaps that old adage has now been proven to be true.

-----------------

Keith Carlson, RN
Public Health Nurse

Preventing Repetitive Stress Injuries With Simple Exercises At Your Desk!

Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI) are injuries which occur as a result of how we repetitively use our bodies when engaging in tasks such as sitting at a desk and typing on a computer keyboard. Although carpal tunnel syndrome is the most well-known RSI, other injuries such as cubital tunnel syndrome or tennis elbow are also very common, as are injuries to the rotator cuff of the shoulder.

RSI's are incredibly common, and a 1998 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that RSI's were a serious national problem, so serious that their combined financial costs were estimated at more than $20 billion annually in lost productivity and other expenses.

If you would like to help prevent yourself from developing RSI's, we have discovered an excellent website that clearly walks you through a series of exercises designed to prevent these injuries from occuring. The website "My Daily Yoga" has a page dedicated to RSI's, and you can access it by clicking here. The exercises are simple, designed to be performed in the office, and focus on the neck, back, forearms, wrists, and fingers. If you're shy about doing them alone, ask a colleague or coworker to do them with you. In fact, maybe your entire office will agree to take part in a ten-minute session during your daily coffee breaks! And if you want even more "desk yoga" exercises, click here for another excellent series.

Taking care of yourself while at work will give you many benefits beyond the work day, and preventing work-related injuries is an excellent way to practice preventive health care without even having to leave the office!

Sugar and Your Diet

Now that Valentine's Day is over, let's talk about sugar!

According to the Food and Drug Administration, Americans' caloric intake of sugar should equal no more than 8% of all calories consumed. However, most reports show that the majority of Americans consume twice that amount of calories in the form of sugars and sweeteners. Taking into consideration that one can of soda contains approximately 10 teaspoons of sugar, it's no wonder that our caloric intake is often dominated by various forms of added sugar.

Unfortunately, American food manufacturers add high-fructose corn syrup or evaporated cane sugar to products ranging from salad dressings to crackers. In our busy lives, we're often too rushed to read nutritional labels when we're at the grocery store. One simple rule of thumb is to look at the ingredient list of an item that you're planning to buy. If sugar, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice or any other form of sugar is in the first three or four ingredients, put that product back on the shelf! Ingredients are listed in descending order, so the first ingredients on an y ingredient list make up the highest percentage of the product.

According to some websites, sugar can have many deleterious effects on one's health, although some would argue whether these lists go a little too far in their claims of sugar's danger to health.

Be that as it may, an elevated intake of sugar certainly increases one's risk of developing diabetes and obesity, and some studies have concluded that sugar does indeed have a direct effect on children's behavior (just ask any parent watching their child at a birthday party or on Hallowe'en night). And let's not forget the impact of sugar on dentition!

If you are interested in losing weight, improving your health---both dental and otherwise---and feeling better in general, decreasing your sugar intake is a very good place to start. If you're unsure what to do first, go through your cabinets and refrigerator, carefully examining the ingredient lists of the foods you purchase on a regular basis. Look closely at the ingredient lists as well as the carbohydrate and sugar count on the nutrition label. If you're shocked by what you see, use that information to seek alternative products the next time you go shopping.

Sugar and the sweetness that it delivers is an acquired taste, and just as we can wean ourselves from high sodium diets, we can also slowly decrease our dependence on sugar. If you would like more information or would like to review how to read nutrition labels on the products that you buy at the store, contact Keith Carlson, RN at the Amherst Health Department for an appointment to review your dietary and shopping strategies.