My name is Dr.
Caroline Douglas and I'm a lecturer in Sports and Exercise Science.
We've been working with East Riding leisure
centres on a variety of different health and healthy lifestyle programmes.
The main we've been working on is the
Live Well programme, which works with individuals with a BMI of over 45
and it's a 26 week programme referred by GP
to help people live a healthier lifestyle rather than have surgery.
Within six months we've seen people reduce their resting
heart rate and their blood pressure as well as eating less sugary
food and increasing the intake of fruit and vegetables in their life.
We've worked with the East Riding Council to help them evaluate and redevelop
the programmes.
The programmes were really successful, but we didn't know why
and what the benefits of the programmes actually were.
So we've been working with them to actually apply some academic rigour
to the actual findings.
It’s great the University could be involved
in one of the greatest lifestyle challenges in modern society,
it’s incredible to be working in this area and actually seeing population
impact, the stuff
that we're doing when we’re researching, actually crunching the numbers,
actually seeing how we can change programmes
and it's actually making a difference to people's lives.