Back in the spring, Andy Cole would have been happy to just keep up with his 5-year-old and almost 2-year-old at the local playground, let alone squat-lift 285 pounds and run two miles without stopping.

The 43-year-old Pineville resident’s slide into tubbydom was a familiar one: Participate in sports in high school (basketball and football); graduate from college; get a job; get married; have kids; gain 100 pounds.

“I went for 20 years doing no exercise at all,” says Cole, whose nearly 6-foot frame was carrying 300 pounds.

Then in April his neighbors turned him on to the magic bullet – an exercise program that did what countless gyms could not.

Sounds like the stuff of late-night TV paid programming, but in fact it dates back to the “days of the Olympic decathlons and pentathlons of ancient Greece,” according to the American Council on Exercise.

This latest exercise phenomenon? Cross-training, or simply not doing the same exercise over and over until you’re tired, bored and on the verge of debilitating injury. Cross-training is, for example, walking or running one day, doing yoga the next, maybe lifting weights the day after that.

In Cole’s case, he enrolled in a rapidly growing international network of gyms built on the fundamentals of cross-training: CrossFit. In Charlotte, CrossFit has grown from two gyms two years ago to eight.

“The workouts vary from day to day; it’s pretty much never the same thing,” says Brandon Cullen, who owns CrossFit Ballantyne, the gym where Cole works out. “We stress full-body functional movements. We’re not working on machines; we’re not lifting in front of mirrors. We’re not reading Us Weekly on the elliptical.”

CrossFit Ballantyne is in an abandoned warehouse, so you might get the impression that cross-training is for aspiring Navy SEALS. It’s not, says Cullen. Unless you want it to be.

If a workout calls for pull-ups, Cullen says, a veteran exerciser might do unvarnished pull-ups, while a newbie could use big rubber bands to lessen the load.

That was critical for Cole when he first walked into CrossFit Ballantyne in April.

“I was a 300-pound guy who hadn’t been exercising in 20 years,” he recalls. He needed that giant rubber band (“I couldn’t do one pull-up”), and that day’s two-mile run involved more walking than running.

But the environment was supportive – classes are small and victories of all sizes are reported on the gym’s blog and Facebook page – and not knowing what he’d be doing when he walked in the door every day kept his interest. Three months have passed, Cole has lost 35 of those 100 post-college pounds, he can squat-lift 285 pounds and he’s more like the Andy Cole he was in high school.

“I can see my body firming up, my chest [and] my arms are stronger and my midsection is tightening up,” Cole says. He’s also doing a better job of keeping up with his energetic kids. All of which contributes to his ultimate endorsement of cross-training and CrossFit.

He says, “I’m a happier person than I was three months ago.”

It helped Josh Handest train for a half marathon. It was even more instrumental in getting him into shape to keep up with his preschool sons.

“My 4-year-old likes being picked up and tossed around,” says the 36-year-old North Raleigh resident. “And the 5-month-old is in a car carrier that gets heavier and heavier to get in and out of the car.”

Functional fitness for daily living and a workout regimen that helps runners and other competitive athletes perform better – all in one! Sounds like the stuff of late-night TV paid-programming, but in fact it dates back to the “days of the Olympic decathlons and pentathlons of ancient Greece,” according to the American Council on Exercise.

This latest exercise phenomenon? Cross-training, or simply not doing the same exercise over and over until you’re tired, bored and on the verge of debilitating injury. It is, for example, walking or running one day, doing yoga the next, maybe lifting weights the day after that.

“It’s like diversifying your portfolio,” says George Whitten, who with his wife Stephanie owns the Fitness4Life Training Center in North Raleigh. “You need to have that balance.”

Fitness4Life embraces the cross-training ethos, offering classes, from cardio kickboxing to karate to XFit to boot camp. Clients pay a monthly fee of $49 and can attend any class – and as many classes – as they want.
Handest signed on when he started having joint pain while training for a half marathon. Mixing in regular cardio kickboxing and boot-camp-type classes improved his overall body strength and allowed him to cut back on pavement-pounding miles. The real plus, though, was the extra energy and strength for surviving his boys.

“I can tear around with them now,” Handest says.

Katy Hijack of Raleigh dabbled with personal trainers and gyms to help with her running. The former proved too pricey, the latter, with traditional classes, didn’t seem to help. When she ran her first marathon last fall – the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington – she felt awful. Her takeaway from the race:
“If you run 26.2 miles, it’s not just about your legs,” she says. “You do use your upper body.”

She joined Fitness4Life, started taking cardio kickboxing and XFit classes, both of which involve exercises for developing strength, flexibility and aerobic capacity. Already, she says, she feels better prepared for her rematch with the Marine Corps Marathon this October.

“My core [midsection] is stronger, my lower back isn’t sore and my legs are stronger,” she says.
Whitten says another attraction of cross-training programs is that not only do they also work for both accomplished athletes and folks coming off the couch but they allow the two populations to work out together.

“Everything we do is scalable,” he says. By that he means if a particular routine calls for pull-ups, a class veteran may do classic pull-ups while a newcomer may use a lower bar, allowing him to get a little push off the floor.

The variety and the scalability are important, Whitten says. Above all, though, he says, cross-training is fun, the way exercise was when we were using all our muscles to run through the woods, to climb trees, to swim at the neighborhood pool. A successful exercise program, he believes, boils down to one thing.

“We need to feel childlike again.”

Despite the fact childhood obesity has reached almost epidemic proportions in the past quarter century — the percentage of obese kids in the U.S. grew from 6.5 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2006, one in three kids born here in 2000 stood a risk of becoming diabetic, the statistics go on — it’s been an issue rarely discussed at the annual well-child exam. According to a 2008 survey of its membership, the American Academy of Pediatrics found that only 52 percent of pediatricians measured patients for their Body Mass Index, an imperfect but general indicator of obesity. Even then, if their BMI indicated they were overweight or obese, 59 percent of pediatricians said they were reluctant to discuss the matter.

Why?

Some health care observers — and pediatricians themselves — say it’s because obesity is a sensitive topic. Parents can be in denial, they may take the diagnosis as a personal affront to their parenting, it may be a cultural issue — all areas that most pediatricians haven’t been trained to deal with.

Chapel Hill pediatrician Edie Bernosky believes the problem is more basic: Until recently, pediatricians haven’t had a good course of action to recommend to parents of overweight and obese kids.

“As part of a general practice, the goal is to talk about growth, development, nutrition,” says Bernosky, with Village Pediatrics. It’s only been through a plethora of clinical studies on childhood obesity over the past few years that solid recommendations have emerged to give parents. In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics took these findings and created a “physicians toolkit” to help its members address the issue. On Thursday, a similar toolkit created by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and tested for six months in five states, was made available nationally.

The BCBS Good Health Club Physician Toolkit was developed in conjunction with the American Diabetes Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The toolkit includes information specifically for physicians as well as handouts to give to parents on topics ranging from appropriate BMI ranges to health tips by age group to a weekly journal kids can keep.

“It’s important to be able to give something parents can take home from the office,” says Dr. Bernosky.

It’s important to keep in simple, too, she says. To that end, the toolkit emphasizes the 5-2-1-0 approach to healthy kid living. That is:

• 5 fruits and vegetables a day
• 2 hours — and no more — of screen time a day
• 1 hour of vigorous physical activity
• 0 sweetened beverages

Dr. Bernosky says she can’t emphasize enough the importance of handouts.

“Handouts help to raise the topic and open discussion. If you can send the parent home with more in-depth information it helps reinforce what was said in the office. It’s an important part of pediatrics.”

You don’t have to go to the pediatrician to benefit from the BCBS Good Health Club Physician Toolkit. All the handouts available through the program are also available at the Good Health Club Web site, which you can access by clicking here.

Photo: We’ll never know if Dr. Drake Ramoray would find a physician’s toolkit helpful since he was … canceled.

Be Active North Carolina. Be Active NC is a non-profit aimed at getting more North Carolinians off the couch and: a) into the gym, b) onto the trail, c) out on the playground, d) all of the above. Among its various programs is Just Push Play, the goal of which is to go into our schools and revive the notion that a kid who is receptive to learning is a kid who gets at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day.

Pepsi REFRESH Project. Pepsi is giving away up to $1.3 million a month in grants — in amounts of $5,000 to $250,000 — to “people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact” in the areas of health, arts & culture, food & shelter, “the planet,” neighborhoods and education. Every month beginning in February, Pepsi has accepted 1,000 ideas from individuals, businesses and non-profits. The following month, the ideas are put to a public vote on the Pepsi Refresh Web site. Winners for that month are announced at month’s end. In April, for instance, the Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation received $250,000 to develop an alternative cancer treatment with no side effects, while boosters of the Ben-Gil Elementary School in Illinois received $250,000 to rebuild their school, which was partially swallowed by an abandoned mine one weekend in March 2009.

As you know, there’s a childhood obesity epidemic in this country that is particularly profound in North Carolina: the state ranks 14th nationwide in the number of obese and overweight kids, with more than a third of our 18-and-under crowd falling into those categories, according to the Trust for America’s Health. Be Active NC is trying to lower our dubious nationwide profile with its Just Push Play program; this month, Be Active is in the running for one of the $250,000 Pepsi Refresh grants to expand the Just Push Play program.

Currently, Just Push Play is in eight schools in the state:  Rutherfordton Elementary  (Rutherford County), Thomasville Elementary (Davidson County), Underwood Elementary (Wake County), Lowe’s Grove Middle School (Durham County), Glenn Elementary School (Durham County), Brentwood Elementary  (Cumberland County), Contentnea-Savannah School  (Lenoir County) and Chatham Middle School (Chatham County).

How, specifically, the program works varies by school. Each school received $10,000 to buy playground equipment, to improve their gyms, to buy heart-rate monitors and pedometers — basically, whatever they need to reintroduce the notion of physical activity to our kids. In addition —

Sorry, but I need time for a quick vent. Every time I write that line — “reintroduce the notion of physical activity to our kids” — I nearly pop a blood vessel. Back in the day, the teachers let us out once in the morning for recess, then turned us over once in the afternoon to a PE teacher to whom “PE” meant “Painful Education.” But we always returned to the classroom with tired bodies and alert minds. It’s just common sense: Let a kid burn off all that extra energy of that comes with being a kid and he/she is much more likely to remember when the Spanish American war was or how — Heaven help me — to diagram a sentence. Quick primal scream: AAHHHHHHHHH! There. Better. Back to our regularly scheduled post …

—  Be Active NC works with the schools to change a culture that encourages dodging sweat instead of dodging dodge balls.

If Be Active NC’s Just Push Play proposal gets enough votes and scores $250,000 through Pepsi Refresh, Jodi Hubble, Be Active’s Director of Development and Communications, says they’ll be able to extend Just Push Play to 20 schools statewide. That’s 20 schools where the notion of more activity = happier, smarter kids has a better chance of becoming reality.

But Be Active’s proposal, which it put together with the help of the ‘nPlay Foundation, nplayfoundation.org/ needs your help. Currently, it ranks just 119th out of the ideas submitted for June. The good news is that it’s only June 5 — there are 26 voting days remaining. In the spirit of Al Capone politics, Pepsi Refresh allows you to vote, if not early, then at least often — once a day, in fact. All you have to do is go here, press the “Vote for this idea” button. You’ll have to register (or you can connect through your Facebook page). Then go to your digital calendar of choice, instruct it to remind you to vote everyday for the rest of the month, and for the next 25 days, take 25 seconds to vote for fit, happy kids.

And don’t treat it like a primary or a runoff election: North Carolina’s sedentary students need your votes.

Photo: Imagine what Bart Simpson could do if Principal Skinner would only give him recess.

• 30+ Use a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with an SPF (Sun Protection Factor) of at least 30 to all exposed skin. By broad-spectrum they mean it provides protection from both ultraviolet A (UVA) and ultraviolet B (UVB) rays.
• Once is never enough. Re-apply sunscreen approximately every two hours, even on cloudy days, and after swimming or sweating.
• Cover up. When possible, wear protective clothing, such as a long-sleeved shirt, pants, a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses.
• Shade is your friend. Especially between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when the sun’s rays are strongest. SRT (Shade Rule of Thumb): If your shadow is shorter than you are, seek shade.
• Protect the kids. Be especially diligent with little ones.
• Water, snow and sand …  all reflect damaging rays of the sun, which can increase your chance of sunburn.
• Avoid tanning beds. Ultraviolet light from the sun and tanning beds can cause skin cancer and wrinkling. “If you want to look like you’ve been in the sun,” advises the AAD, “consider using a sunless self-tanning product, but continue to use sunscreen with it.”
• Birthday exam. On your birthday, give yourself the once over. If you notice anything changing/growing/bleeding, see a dermatologist. “Skin cancer,” advises the AAD, “is very treatable when caught early.

How treatable?

“Studies show that the five-year survival rate for people whose melanoma is detected and treated before it spreads to the lymph nodes is 99 percent – making early detection essential,” says dermatologist Zoe D. Draelos, MD, a consulting professor at Duke University School of Medicine.

So what exactly am I looking for?

The skin doctors advise you to abide by your ABCDEs when checking for telltale moles:

• Asymmetric Half of the mole is unlike the other half.
• Border Edges are irregular, scalloped or poorly defined.
• Color Varies from one area to another and may include shades of tan and brown, black; sometimes white, red or blue.
• Diameter Take note if it’s the size of a pencil eraser or larger.
• Evolving If it looks different in size, shape or color than it did earlier.
• (There should also be a “U,” but that would bollix the alphabet thing: U as in an “ugly duckling,” or a mole that looks different from the others.)

OK, I’ll do it. I’ll examine myself.

You say that, but according to a recent survey of 7,000 adults nationwide there’s a good chance you won’t: 28 percent of respondents said they never check themselves out. Nearly a third of the “I haven’ts” were men, nearly a third between 19 and 29 years of age.

Then I’ll go to a doctor.

The odds of that are even worse. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed had never been screened for skin cancer, a figure that jumps 10 percentage points for the 18-29 crowd.

Stop nagging.

We’re not nagging. We just worry about you.

Well … OK. Where can I go for more information?

Here. And thanks for asking.

That’s the thinking behind the Small Steps Web site  run by the government (the White House and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services).

Small Steps is a small but effective, non-overwhelming Web site that appreciates that people have various challenges to living a healthy life, not the least of which is making a second career out of trying to live a healthy life. It offers quick tips and suggestions for being more physically active and eating better. The site is divided into two components:

Small Step Kids Goal: eat healthy but fun, move for at least 60 minutes a day. To that end, it offers fun, healthy, quick recipies — a strawberry yogurt shake that requires unsweetened pineapple juice, low-fat yogurt, unsweetened frozen strawberries, a touch of granulated sugar and a power tool, a blender! — and fun ways to move, such as “Daffy Duck” (which is actually freeze tag gussied up with a Loony Tunes character). There’s also a section for teachers to make the classroom healthier.

Small Step Adults and Teens This is where the time constraints of modern living are taken into consideration. There’s a tip of the day (Today’s: Use vegetable oils over solid fats), which suggest small steps that go a long way toward fixing bad habits and suggestions for small ways you can be more active, such as:

• Take the dog for a walk rather than just letting her out in the backyard.
• Take the stairs, not the elevator.
• Play with the kids, rather than sitting on a bench and watching them.

Small Steps: A simple Web site with simple suggestions that can make a difference.

But this camp isn’t like the camps of summer’s way past, where new lanyard-weaving techniques were learned, where a mangled camp song solo was greeted with water balloons, where the older kids thought up devious pranks to pull on their underlings. This camp is the new approach to conferences, where top down is turned on its ear and the participants vote on what they want to discuss and learn about. Within a topical framework, of course, which for today’s camp is three rapidly emerging areas of health care: mobile health, telemedicine and social health.

HealthCampRDU is billed as “America’s Largest Healthcare Think Tank.” Fifteen breakout sessions are scheduled for the day, on topics ranging from “Social Media’s Role Helping Shift Our Culture from Treating to Wellness,” to “How to Keep Employees Engaged in Their Health” to “Why Does Amazon Know Me Better Than My Doctor?” to “Confessions of a Crackberry Addict: How Does Our New Found Mobility Affect Our Mental Health?” Three keynote addresses are also planned:

• Nick Augustinos, Senior Director of Global Healthcare Solutions with Cisco will address “Health Care Innovations – Cisco’s Perspective.”
• Robert Furberg, Research Programmer and Analyst with RTI International will talk about Transforming Health Care Delivery: The Mobile Communications, Connectivity, New Media, and Medicine Revolution.”
• Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, Director of the Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center at Duke University Medical Center.

The goal of HealthCampRDU, which is sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, is simple: To bring together local health care types — insurers, academia, the government, providers, industry and patients — to share their thoughts and experiences. It’s a rare opportunity for the various players in the local health care community to hear what one another is thinking.

I’ll be covering as much ground as possible at today’s camp, and will provide live coverage via Twitter (www.twitter.com/joeagogo). I’ll also share some thoughts on my day at camp in this space next week — a letter from camp, if you will.

Speaking of which, I leave you for now with one man’s take on time-honored tradition of summer camp.

Yesterday, I went to Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill headquarters for their kick-off of both Walk@Lunch Week/Day (technically, it’s just a day, but we here at GGNC have decreed it worthy of at least a week’s observance) and their Focus on Exercise second quarter challenge. I was curious about the event not because BCBSNC sponsors this blog (although … ) but because who better than a company that provides health insurance would better appreciate the wisdom of keeping its employees healthy and thus, not going to the doctor. And missing work. And filing pricey claims. It’s not philanthropy, it’s just plain business sense.

BCBSNC rewards employees for healthy behavior, and not with just a water bottle, a T-shirt and an atta-boy/girl. Rather, they award employees credits toward reducing their health care premium. The health insurer’s program is called Healthy Dividends. Employees are required to log their activity, undergo an annual biometric health screening and an online health assessment. The more they participate, the more credits they earn — up to $750 worth against their medical premiums, according to BCBSNC Wellness Manager Jen Arnold. Arnold says about 2,000 of BCBSNC’s 4,700 employees participate in the program.

Yes, you did have to weigh in to qualify, but the results were confidential.

For added incentive to keep employees moving, the company also kicked off a six-week Focus on Exercise program. The company is divided into teams, the teams collect points based on individual employee’s activity. Among other things, they have to document working out at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes and watch a weekly health-related online presentation.

What helps make the program work — and I say this based on employee response and reaction at a pep rally of sorts to kick off the program — is that this is a top-down deal. At the kick-off, Don Bradley, Senior Vice President for Healthcare and Chief Medical Officer, said his goal is to lose 12 pounds during the six-week program (though he declined to say from what to what). He also vowed to give a quarter to anyone who sees him taking a company elevator (as opposed to the healthier company stairs) and give a dime to anyone he passes in the stairwell.

That elicited a scoff from Alan Hughes, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “I’ll give you more than a quarter,” he promised the assembled employees. Hughes, btw, is captaining one of the aforementioned Focus on Exercise teams, and he made it clear that he wants to win. He really wants to win.

A better body and workplace sanity are enough on their own to justify taking a walk at lunch, but wouldn’t it be good to get your bosses to pay you to leave your desk as well? Makes sense to the BCBSNC bosses, it should to yours as well.

Maybe your first Walk@Lunch walk should be down to HR to get this ball moving.

Photo: BCBSNC workers head out for a walk on the mile-long natural surface trail that rims the Chapel Hill campus.

We’ve already gone over what National Walk@Lunch Week/Day is and why it’s important. Today, we’ll discuss how to make it happen. Not that taking a walk is rocket science, but it’ll behoove you to have a little direction going into tomorrow.

What you’ll need

Walking shoes are good, but they needn't be fancy.

Shoes & socks. While some shoes can double as work & workout shoes, for the most part you’re smart to bring a separate pair of shoes dedicated to the purpose. You don’t need fancy athletic shoes, just something comfy that won’t cause blisters or otherwise mess with your feet. As for socks, a pair of plain old athletic socks will serve the purpose, which basically is to keep you from having sweaty feet the rest of the day.

Wet wipes. Speaking of sweat, there’s a chance you might work up a little. Some people stash wet wipes in their desk to freshen up with after a walk. (Amazing what a swipe under the arms can do minimize collateral damage.) Others stick a damp washcloth in a ziplock bag. Hand sanitizer applied in the aforementioned

Wet wipes help eliminate a post-walk glow.

pits works as well.

A quick, portable lunch. Ironically, while a main goal here is to keep you from eating at your desk, you likely will end up eating at your desk — but only because your alotted lunch period has been consumed with a walk! Thus, you’ll need something quick and portable, something you can eat with preparation and without paying it much attention, and because you’ve just done well by your body and don’t want to ruin the effect, something healthy. Veggies (carrots and cherry tomatoes top my list), fruit (we’re coming into strawberry season), and maybe a sandwich (mustard instead of mayo, wheat bread instead of white), and you’ll have one happy body the rest of the day.

Game day game plan

Breakfast. It is the most important meal of the day, even more so if you’ll be burning extra fuel over the noon hour. Don’t scrimp; make sure you’re sufficiently fueled to make the most of your walk.

Pre-walk refueling. Even if you had a good breakfast, it won’t hurt to have a quick snack an hour before you walk. A handful of nuts, for instance, is particularly effective.

Never leave a naked office chair.

Slipping away. Let’s face it, if you have a reputation of working through lunch, you may be a little concerned about being away from your post for 30 minutes or — gads! — 35. You may need to ease your boss and coworkers into the notion of you being away. Do this by giving the appearance that you’ve just slipped away for a moment. A sweater over the back of your chair, a report scattered across your desk, even buying a piping hot cup of coffee to leave on your desk just before heading out — all good ways to divert attention.

Enlist recruits. Another way to not draw attention to your absence: Recruit coworkers. If they’re in on the act, they won’t left to speculate on your whereabouts.

How long should I walk? Shoot for half an hour. One camp of healthcare advocates says that as little as 10 minutes of continuous walking can do you good. This may be true, but if you really want to reap the benefits of being active, you should keep your heart working for a good 30 minutes. It’s discouraging to be doing what you think you’re supposed to be doing and not feel better or see results; minimize that risk with a minimum 30-minute walk.

Where should I walk? Good question, one we’ll answer tomorrow.

Post walk. If you did your job and got your heart rate up, chances are you’ll return with what the more genteel among us would label a “glow,” the rest of us a good sweat. Five minutes or so of chilling in a cool spot should erase most of that glow, those wet wipes you packed should handle the rest.

Log it. I’m big on logging workouts, if for no other reason than at the end of the week you can look back and see that at least you accomplished something. If you’re a just-the-facts type, your distance and time will suffice. Those of you who like a more complete recollection of history may also want to record the weather, where you walked, who you walked with, what you thought about on your walk.

Your thought here.

What I thought about? Yes, what you thought about. For while you may think that the main reason to walk over lunch is for your physical well-being, you’ll be surprised by what it does for you mentally. Away from email, away from the phone, away from the constant barrage of demanding coworkers and bosses, you’ll discover the true benefit of taking 30 minutes to take a walk: time to think.

Or, perhaps more crucially, not.

Let’s take a walk.

A fact that will surprise few of you: In 2006, KFC — the fried chicken people — conducted a survey of working America’s lunchtime habits that found, among other things, that nearly two-thirds of worker bees surveyed declared the lunch “hour” to be “the biggest myth in office life.” In practice, 52 percent said they took less than 30 minutes for lunch and 58 percent reported that they eat at their desk and work through lunch.

Most unfortunate, this apparent feeling by much of the workforce (including our pictured friend) that they need to work through lunch in order to squeeze out another widget by the 5 o’clock whistle. Unfortunate, too, that corporate America does little to discourage this behavior. Because by letting their workers stay at their desks over lunch, they’re damaging the bottom line. Here’s why.

More productive workers. You don’t need a study — although plenty have been done — to tell you that a little exercise boosts brainpower. According to one study of 210 office workers conducted by Leeds Metropolitan University in England, 65 percent of those who exercised between 45 minutes and an hour scored better on tests evaluating their subsequent mental-interpersonal performance, their ability to manage time and their productivity. Staying glued to your desk actually diminishes your productivity as the day wears on.

Healthier workers. In 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health care costs associated with “physical inactivity” exceeded $76 billion (a chunk of which was paid for through employer health care plans). “If 10% of adults began a regular walking program,” says the CDC, “$5.6 billion in heart disease costs could be saved.” Also: Unhealthy workers miss more work.

Happier workers. Your office may have the spiffiest, high-tech cubicles going, but after spending 9 hours straight in one you might as well be in a concrete cell. Getting out, getting some sun, getting fresh air does wonders for one’s disposition.

So why attack the problem now? It’s National Walk @ Lunch Week.  If you’ve never taken the opportunity to walk over your lunch hour, here’s your chance. Walking isn’t complicated, which is one reason it’s the most popular form of exercise in the country. (96.6 million of us walked for exercise last year, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.) But to get the most out of your 30-minute (or more) walk, it’s good to plan ahead. So, come back next week when:

• Sunday: Tips on how to turn your lunch hour into your hour of power walking.
• Monday: How to make your noon-time walk not just a workout but an adventure!