Lifetime Campaign

LIFETIME CAMPAIGN
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An individual’s quality of life and overall self esteem is improved through living a healthier life, in addition to extending the individual’s life. Some aspects of physical and mental health are usually beyond control of an individual as well as science, but there are lots of things which can be improvised to improve the quality of life. T.E.A.M. Weight Loss, a campaign created by Lifetime Fitness has well demonstrated healthy lifestyles, by making individuals become aware of what ideas they can learn from the campaign and jumpstart healthy living. Being aware of the effects of unhealthy lifestyles, individuals are able to set realistic goals, and monitor the outcome, thereby changing their unhealthy habit and hence, maintaining success of healthy living. The introduction of campaign T.E.A.M. Weight Loss by Lifetime Fitness was to assist individuals to adapt to healthy habits. The purpose of this essay is to explore the strategies employed by the T.E.A.M. Weight Loss campaign in enhancing the society to adapt to healthy lifestyles.
America society is faced with a crisis of overweight. Medical reports indicate that 72 million adults are currently battling with obesity. This number has double in a span of 30 years with morbid obesity ranking the second cause of premature deaths in the US (Bean, Stewart, & Olbrisch, 2008). Obesity contribute largely to fatal deseases such as high blood pressure and heart diease which have negative effects to an individual as well as the whole society. Moreover, obesity is not only a physical battle, but also as a mental one. Medical reports indicate that people struggling with overweight or obesity become socially discriminated in the form of negative coments, social exclusion, and subjection to physical barriers and obstacles (Bean, Stewart, & Olbrisch, 2008,p. 215).
Life has become a dangerous struggle when individuals live with a body mass index of 30 and over. Children have also fallen ill due to the problem of obesity, and reports indicated that one third of children in the US are struggling the consequences of being overweight. This has posed threatening consequences to children than doctors, parents, and scientists earlier thought (Bean, Stewart, & Olbrisch, 2008). The devastating effects of being overweight that are caused by eating disorders such as Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and Night Eating Syndrome (NES), involve overeating of food rich in calories and misuse of foods (Bean, Stewart, & Olbrisch, 2008, p. 216). These unhealthy habits of eating do not provide a better life, and thus, there is a need to take a stand against obesity and develop a “healthy way of life” as Lifetime fitmess motto states (Lifetime Fitness, 2010).
Lifetime Fitness, a health club that has strived to offer the best practices of healthy lifestyles across the US and Canada in more than 150 locations, has developed an easy and healthy way of living a healthy life. The Lifetime Fitness mission of “providing educational, entertaining, friendly and inviting, fuctional and innovative experience of uncompromising quality that meets the health and fitness needs of the entire family” has enhanced the club to help the society to accomplish their weight loss goals. More than 83% of individuals who join the Lifetime Fitness club are interested in losing weight since the club has developed appropriate programs to meet the needs and interests of customers (Tom Parker, personal communication, January 28, 2013).
T.E.A.M. Weight Loss stands for training, educatioin, accountability and motivation. The campaign provides a twelve week program consisting of both men and women in need of losing weight working together as they meet three times in a week. Indiviuals have access to train with a professional fitness coach and a registered dietician. Each session lasts for one hour and focuses on cardiovascular workouts, though it can be altered to meet the individual’s personal fitness level. The education provided in this weight loss campaign becomes the foundation of healthy living (Lifetime Fitness, 2010).
There are specified goals that T.E.A.M. Weight Loss desires to reach through the campaign, and education is the primary goal in terms of exercise and nutrition. The overarching goal of weight loss is the organization’s last concern, to witness change in measurements, whether in pounds or inches, because this is the main reason why people join the club. Is a person happy looking in the mirror? Is the individual able to maintain on his/her own? If so, goals were reached (LifetimeFitness, 2010).
Success is measured by calculation on an individual levels in this campain. Success is defined in the club as the ability to offer people tools and motivation they require to accomplish lifestyle modification so that they can get their weight off, implement the concept of healthy living, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. If individuals are able to maintain the healthy lifestyle after three years, it is therefore a success since they keep track of them (Tom Parker, personal communication, January 28, 2013).
Success is determined by the idea of lifestyle modification, the individuals stays on track, and the club’s campaign provides a continued success and monitoring of individuals. T.E.A.M. Fitness and T.E.A.M. Boot Camp are the second and third steps that follow weight loss campaign, because these programs are installed to constantly improve on healthy habits created in the previous campaign. The education and training enable individuals to make daily, monthly and yearly changes in their lifestyles to remain healthy.
The underlying foundation that determines the success or failures of a desired goal is communication. This is because strategies for effective communication differ from individual to individual and organization to organization, and the likelihood of an individual’s or a group’s success in achieving goals is determined by a strong and specified foundation. The modification of healthy lifestyle by T.E.A.M. Weight Loss was created mainly through the availability of physical resources and its marketing strategies such as buzz marketing. The fitness campaign was shaped and modeled by communication theories such as cognitive dissonance theory, elaboration likelihood model, and social impact theory.
The promotion of T.E.A.M. Weight Loss was essentially through the use of word of mouth, which became an influential source of success because it enticed people to try out the program. Thomas Parker (2013) made it clear that people who had already finished their class or were in it, got the benefits of the campaign better by working at the gym. The primary aspect of word of mouth is that it is peer driven by participants, and is naturally authentic since participants have witnessed success in their own appearance and have the need to share with others. Consequently, word of mouth goes collectively with the campaign’s buzz marketing.
There are a variety of ways that buzz marketing is employed to work for T.E.A.M. weight loss. This includes the campaign’s effortless transfer of information from one person to the next due to the simplicity to tell about. This method offered an inherent appeal because of the desire in the society to lose weight maintaining scalability through Lifetime Fitness support and the availability of resources. Buzz marketing works to the advantage of the campaign given that it is the largest and easiest way of spreading knowledge by communicating about the benefit of joining T.E.A.M. Weight Los...