Doctor Feel Good

Rajiv Kumar is a man on a mission: to help Rhode Islanders become the biggest losers (of weight, that is) and, in the process, get hooked on healthy living.

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Kumar’s naturally adept at finding solutions. Anoop Raman, Kumar’s best friend from Brown, remembers a small instance of a noisy door at the library: “People would put up signs, ‘Please close the door gently.’ But it still would slam. So, Rajiv was like, ‘This is dumb.’ He sent a letter to the facilities manager, and the next day it was fixed.”

Stephen Smith, who advised Kumar as a freshman at Brown through his first two years of medical school, calls such problem-solving a “logical, systematic way of thinking.” Smith got to know Kumar when he, as a freshman, took Smith’s health-policy class, Cost vs. Care: The Dilemma for American Medicine.

“I could see his interest in trying to solve some of those problems we face,” recalls Smith, who was the associate dean at Brown’s medical school for twenty-five years. “He had a deep social conscience, and he recognized some of the injustice in our [medical] system.

“What never changed was the sort of unusual combination that I saw in him of both the entrepreneur and the social justice champion,” says Smith, who teaches family medicine. “Most of the time, people who are activists are not exactly realistic. They’re out to change the world, and they’re highly idealistic and not very pragmatic. What I saw in Rajiv was a high degree of activism and pragmatism. He had a tremendous sense of coming up with real, business-savvy solutions.”

Kumar has adopted a sound business model to reduce obesity in Rhode Island. He entices companies to pay for their employees to participate, although individuals can enroll as well. The $15 per person registration fee brings in money to organize a handful of educational events, manage the website and fund end-of-competition functions, such as last summer’s softball tournament fundraiser that featured former Red Sox slugger Sam Horn.

Once a team has been organized, it competes for twelve weeks in up to three disciplines: weight loss, exercise hours and steps, the latter tallied by a pedometer. Each player logs his or her progress online, and totals are kept for each team. Weight-loss information is kept confidential, viewed only by the participant.

As I enter his office, Kumar is analyzing stats from the 6,916 Rhode Islanders who took part in the 2007 campaign. He clicks on his laptop to a screen that displays three charts. The average person lost 7.6 pounds, he says, with a high of fifty-eight pounds and dozens who lost about thirty. Each person exercised for forty-two minutes daily on average during the competition, which could have included a trip to the gym or a walk around the block. And each person walked about 4.9 miles daily. (That’s 10,000 steps on the pedometer.)

“These are stunning results,” Kumar proclaims with a hint of pride. “What’s exciting about this is it’s not a quick fix. We’re not telling people, ‘Lose fifty pounds in three months, and your life is changed forever, and that’s the end of the story.’ What we’re doing is helping people incorporate behavior change, physical activity, into their daily lifestyle, and the goal is that they will maintain this healthy behavior for the long term.”

The Shape Up RI website is full of testimonials from former participants. Many speak of the program as just the catalyst they needed to begin exercising. Others talk about the initiative as a bonding experience with friends and strangers. Some say they persevered because they feared letting their team down.

Ann N. Davis was nearing desperation when she decided to give Shape Up RI a try in February 2007. She was popping meds daily for achy joints, and she was on the cusp of being diagnosed for high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension. On her last visit, her doctor told her, “I will give you six months, and if I don’t see improvement, I will put you on medication.”

Davis, a leadership development coordinator at Lifespan, weighed 170 pounds when she took her first step with Shape Up RI. When the competition ended, she had slimmed to 150 pounds—and is still keeping it off. “The most exciting thing was taking clothes I had purchased in my largest size to the tailor,” says Davis, who’s fifty-three.

She says the program gave her incentive, discipline and structure. She plans to participate in the next round and is eyeing hooking up with a more competitive team. “I continue to watch my intake and the things I eat,” Davis says. “It’s not to say I don’t enjoy a fatty pastry, but I don’t eat a box. I’m cognizant of the calories, whereas before I just didn’t care.”

For Kumar, it’s the personal anecdotes that carry more weight than the pounds shed. He ticks them off from memory: the woman who lowered her cholesterol so much that she no longer needed gall bladder surgery; the fifty-four-year-old who had been chained to diets since she was twelve, and for the first time was able to lose weight and keep it off; the man who dropped forty-one pounds during the competition and finished within three pounds of his marriage-day weight nearly two decades ago.

“It’s humbling,” says Kumar, “to think that in twelve weeks you can change somebody’s life.”