Adventists give members healthy-living training to live life to the full

By JUNIOR UKAHA
HEALTHY living and lifestyle is important and it must be encouraged, says Seventh-day Adventist Church health-director Gad Koito.
Koito said this yesterday following the completion of a two-month healthy-living programme by church members at their head office along Coronation Drive in Lae, Morobe.
The participants were presented certificates for successfully completing the complete health improvement programme (Chip).
Koito said many people died early because of lifestyle diseases.
“Chip is a lifestyle intervention programme aimed at addressing lifestyle diseases,” he said.
“With this programme, we are now saying that you can reverse lifestyle diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and others and add years to your life.
“We believe that tablets are not the solution to lifestyle diseases.
“If we want to see a reduction in lifestyle diseases than we have to change our lifestyle.”
Koito said the programme had ran for two months, comprising of 18 practical, theory and group sessions.
“Each session ran for about 19 minutes,” Koito said. “The topics covered included what lifestyle disease was, increase in lifestyle diseases in modern times, the need to exercise, healthy eating habits and good foods.
“All the participants had their sugar level, cholesterol level, weight, heart rate and so on checked before they undertook the programme.”
It included a walking session where participants were required to walk 10,000 steps a day which were measured on a pedometer.
Koito said the programme could be rolled out to communities.
Participant Sheila Gula said the programme was helpful because it taught her how to take care of herself and avoid lifestyle diseases.
She said the programme had changed her.