A Good Fit at Fitwell

When nutrition undergraduates Erin Reese (’13, SPH’15) and Danny Neilson (’15) asked the Boston teenagers in their first community cooking class whether they had prepared a meal before, they were met with silence. “The only kid who eventually said yes, said he knew how to cook cereal,” says Gina Petracca (’16), a nutrition graduate student. Reese, Neilson, and Petracca helped develop the class for the Boston University Fitness & Wellness Center at the Blackstone Community Center (FitWell) in Boston’s South End. A collaboration between Boston University and Boston Centers for Youth & Families (BCYF), FitWell provides residents with the skills they need to make physical activity and healthy choices an enduring part of their lifestyles. In the weekly cooking class, supervised by Stacey Zawacki, director of the Sargent Choice Nutrition Center, the Sargent students covered topics like nutrition, healthy meal preparation, and kitchen skills, including knife safety. At the end of class, they gave the teens grocery bags with ingredients so they could duplicate the meal or experiment with new recipes on their own. The following week, the teens shared their cooking experiences.

By developing and conducting the course, the Sargent students learned as much as the Blackstone teens. Reese discovered that soliciting the teens’ input as the course progressed kept them invested in the lessons. “They’d come to our class after nine hours of school, so we had to think of ways to keep them engaged,” she says. They encouraged the teens to brainstorm meals for their lessons and ensured that the classes were applicable to their daily lives. “Telling them that fruits and vegetables will help them fight diabetes one day wasn’t relevant to them,” says Petracca. Instead, they showed the teens how healthy eating choices could benefit them now—making them more fit or helping them concentrate in school. “It was a great opportunity to present healthy eating in a creative way,” Neilson says. The cooking class posed unexpected challenges. Blackstone does not have a kitchen, so Reese and Neilson had to get creative with a hot plate. They also had to change the lesson plan on the fly, when they found that younger siblings were tagging along to the after-school class; suddenly a class designed for teenagers had children joining in. “You don’t want to give a paring knife to a first grader,” Reese says. Instead of barring the younger siblings, they assigned tasks like measuring ingredients to the children and chopping to the older kids.

“Before FitWell opened, there wasn’t much of an option for affordable physical activity in the South End community. Programs like this help improve the members’ overall quality of life.” —Lindsey Wallis

Adults at the BCYF Blackstone Community Center had a different kind of lesson. Christina Brigante (’12, ’14) and Elizabeth LaMay (’12, ’14), both doctor of physical therapy students, taught physical fitness to help those over the age of 55 reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. While conducting a survey in spring 2013, Brigante and LaMay discovered that older Blackstone members often avoid the gym, “where top-40 music is playing and young, strong people are exercising,” says LaMay. “Some members of the older adult population found it overwhelming.” To ease the adults into the gym and meet their exercise needs, the Sargent students launched a specialized program to “get the members acclimated to the gym and equipment, and give them exercises based on what they wanted to target,” says LaMay. Supervised by Clinical Assistant Professor Jean Peteet, the students taught exercise classes once a week for two months, focusing each session on a specific part of the body. To accommodate participants with a wide range of athletic abilities, the Sargent students selected exercises “that we could regress for people who found it too difficult, or progress for higher-level participants,” says LaMay.

Sargent students were gratified that their lessons continued beyond the classes, particularly when a teenager went home and made taco salad for his family, or an older adult continued to exercise after class had ended for the day. Both courses were so popular that FitWell renewed them for 2014. “Before FitWell opened, there wasn’t much of an option for affordable physical activity in the South End community,” says Lindsey Wallis, assistant manager of fitness at FitWell. “Programs like this help improve the members’ overall quality of life.”