Fitness her calling

Robin Givhan

Washington Post

WASHINGTON – First lady Michelle Obama sits in her East Wing office, a bowl of fresh apples on a nearby table. She wears a body-conscious gray sleeveless sheath with an artful corsage of matching fabric. A Georgetown University student – one of the young women from the White House mentoring program Obama established last year – quietly observes as the first lady discusses the role physical fitness played in her Chicago girlhood.

The tableau contains all the elements that have defined Obama’s time in the White House: youth outreach, distinctive style, healthful food and fitness. Of all these, nutrition and physical activity are key to the legacy Obama would like to leave. They’re essential to her national rallying cry to end the crisis of childhood obesity in a generation.

The first lady launched her sweeping initiative, Let’s Move, in an early February publicity surge that had her discussing “food deserts” and the urgency of clearer labeling. She lobbied the National Governors Association before its members partied at the White House. She visited schools and at a Philadelphia grocery store pulled out a $20 bill to buy a banana-strawberry smoothie. The statistics she has repeated are both jarring and daunting: One in three children is overweight or obese. The dollars she has proposed the federal government dedicate to the dilemma are significant: at least $10 billion over 10 years.

Most of the attention has focused on the nutrition part of the equation – thanks in large part to her vegetable garden that took on astonishing international significance. Let’s Move aims to make wide-ranging improvements to the eating habits of a food-addled society. Fitness is a less discussed, yet crucial, piece of her initiative. She will unveil the details of a comprehensive fitness agenda in the coming weeks.

“If kids are naturally active, they shouldn’t have to worry about what they eat. That’s how it was when we were growing up. Nobody talked to you about nutrition. You ate your vegetables. You ate what was on your plate. And you went outside and played. There wasn’t a need for structured activity,” she says in an interview in her office. “The physical education piece is about exploring that. In our nation, what happened? What have been the cultural trends that have led us away from that regular exercise and activity that kids used to get?”

The days when children came home from school and went outside to play until the streetlights came on aren’t coming back, Obama acknowledges. She wants to lead the way in finding contemporary, healthy traditions.

“How do we answer the questions or give solutions or approaches to parents in all different kinds of communities?” she asks rhetorically. “There are going to be kids who can’t just go out and play. They’re home alone or their neighborhoods aren’t safe. … Or what about families that are living out in rural areas where they don’t have a car and can’t go to the local soccer field?”

“We have to decide as a nation that physical activity and nutrition and all that stuff is just as important as test scores and good grades, textbooks and everything else we make the trade off for,” she says. Failure to make those things a priority “can kill our kids.”

Growing up in Chicago, Obama was a self-described “tall, lanky, crazy-skinny kid.” She has never had to battle the scale in significant ways. As a child, her daily routine included dashing outside after school, where she rode her bicycle, played tag and jumped double Dutch.

“In my mind, I still picture the neighborhood where we played,” she says. “You’d maybe take a break and sit on the stoop or run inside to get water, but you were doing that just to get it done because you didn’t want to miss out on anything.”

“If I’m more reflective, because my father had multiple sclerosis and physical movement wasn’t a given for him, as I talk to my brother now, neither one of us took our physical fitness for granted. We knew our father was a jock when he grew up – he boxed – and to see him go from that so quickly, without any warning, to someone who couldn’t walk without crutches, you don’t take that for granted.”

For the first lady, physical activity wasn’t a matter of dutiful exercise; it wasn’t scheduled. It was family time with her father.

“He did his best to always get out there with us. When he’d come home from work, if he was on a shift that would allow him to, we’d be boxing or throwing the ball or playing dodge ball. There was always some game involved.”

As a kid in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Obama was on the cusp of the generation of women who reaped the full benefits from Title IX, a law giving girls equal access to sports. Title IX was enacted in 1972, when Obama was 8. “Even though I was a bit of a tomboy then, there weren’t organized leagues for girls that I can recall,” she says.

She never played any sports with dedication, although she ran a bit of track in high school, “but by then I was more focused on academics,” she says.

In contrast, her older brother, Craig Robinson, went on to basketball stardom at Princeton University and now coaches the Oregon State men’s basketball team. “Once he got to the age of being on team sports, we’d spend all our time in the gym watching his games,” she says. “I could throw and I could catch, but that’s what the boys did.”

Fun, Fly & Fit, a project launched in 2010 by the United Way of the National Capital Area that brings mobile gym classes into schools, churches and community centers, is a program almost tailored to the first lady’s childhood obesity initiative. It’s grass-roots and free; it provides children and their parents with nutrition information; and it focuses on the importance of play. And it has a secret weapon: celebrity trainer Mark Jenkins.

Jenkins has both the physique and the carriage that one would expect of a former Navy recruit and the cheerleading personality of someone who guided music mogul Sean Combs to a four-hour finish in the New York City Marathon after only two months of preparation. Jenkins’ height hovers at six feet; his legs are like tree trunks and his biceps are sharply defined. As the spokesman for Fun, Fly & Fit, he brings razzle-dazzle to the nation’s overly sedentary children. For free. He doesn’t offer magical formulas for curing what Surgeon General Regina Benjamin described in a recent report as an epidemic of overweight and obese children who are on track to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. He just brings motivation.

“The biggest problem with the fitness community is just because something is the right thing to do doesn’t mean you don’t have to market it,” Jenkins says.

His message echoes what the first lady describes in her regular plea: She tells young people “whether you feel it or not, your best days are ahead, really, if you make some good short-term decisions and don’t do stupid things. The bulk of your life is left ahead. And if you’ve got some money, you’ve got a job, you don’t want to be in the hospital because you have high blood pressure. You don’t want to take insulin shots.”

Jenkins takes that message and puts it in vivid, music video color. He tells kids how the stars train. He also cuts to the bottom-line: Obese people make less money. The children take notice.

The first lady reassures her audiences that healthy eating doesn’t have to mean a lifetime of steamed broccoli and grilled chicken by describing her love for fries and burgers. She takes the same approach with fitness. She has told many audiences of the pleasures in slacking off.

Obama might have been a pre-teen jock, but she came to fitness – in its modern form as a scheduled activity – late. “I’ve been much more physically active since I’ve had kids: going to aerobics class, going to a trainer, going to the gym, eventually taking up tennis and playing that a little bit more.”