Healthy Rules of the Road
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Dear Families, I am so glad you are starting down the highway to healthy choices. Your owner’s manual was designed as a guide with one purpose: for you to make the best choices to meet your family’s needs. EACH MONTH HAS A FOCUS First Month Introduce the concepts of “Rules of the Road.” Use the 30 Ways for 30 Healthy Days Calendar for this month. Second Month Make heart healthy choices by choosing as many green light foods as possible as fuels. Third Month Activity month has the goal of revving your engines with many different activities. Congratulations: Celebrate reaching your final destination by performing a check engine light assessment of how your body has performed over the course of your trip. Use the evaluation form at the end of the manual. You will be provided with a calendar (which you may print out for each month) to help track your healthy choices. Your final “destination” will be to complete 3 of these calendars. This is meant as a guide (only), a road map if you will. Only you can decide where it will lead you. There will be detours, road blocks and U-turns, but as long as you keep moving forward you will achieve the goal of a healthy, well-tuned, high performance engine. You will find this program is different as it designates YOU as the main driver. I will provide the concepts to work with and incorporate into your daily routine, but you own the “title” to this vehicle. You will make the decisions that are specifically designed for your body to reach its top performance. Listen to what I call your “inner GPS” which is a powerful navigation tool that will guide you to the best choices for you. Healthy Rules of the Road is a visual and vocabulary based program since 80% of our learning is visual. The green light concept of making decisions is an exciting way of thinking and can be applied to healthy choices in all areas of your life. As parents, we have the unique opportunity to help our children achieve healthy lifestyles. We can serve as what I like to call “road models” by applying the concepts found in this manual. Each family is stronger when everyone participates and becomes involved in the choices. Our nutritional choices or fuels are the most important decisions we make. So, pull up a chair, create your own learning lab in your kitchen and, as a family, design your own road trip to healthy choices. I would enjoy hearing about all the trips you take as you continue to drive the many roads to a healthy lifestyle. I am excited for you to begin. Thank you for allowing me to share this journey with you. Remember to sign up for the Healthy Highway newsletter for more ideas and information at www.Healthy-Highway.com. Sincerely, Wendy Cooper Wendy Cooper President & Founder www.healthy-highway.com wcooper@healthy-highway.com
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About the Book
Healthy Rules of the Road educates, motivates, and inspires families to make healthy lifestyle choices and to become aware of those choices. The traffic-themed vocabulary and visual tools give children and adults a common and easy way to talk about what it means to be healthy and which choices can best be applied. Learn how green-light decisions can be applied in all areas of life. Watch children become empowered to take charge of their choices and to help others. Drive down the healthy highway as a family to create your road map to your own healthy lifestyle. This is a trip of a lifetime—welcome to the state of good health!
About the Author
Wendy Cooper, a physical education teacher for 30 years and mother of two, is the founder and president of the award-winning Healthy Highway program. This program uses traffic themes and metaphors to encourage families to make healthy choices in all areas of their lives. This program has been used in schools around the country and received national recognition when it was featured on Rachael Ray’s Yum-O website. One of Wendy’s greatest honors was being a featured exhibitor at the Alliance for a Healthier Generation conference in Washington, D.C. Other awards include: the Special Olympics Healthy Communities Partner of Excellence Award; the first Greece Chamber of Commerce's Annual Community Health Award; and the Amazing Person Retiree Award presented by NYSAHPERD. Her passion to help families live healthier lives led her to write Healthy Rules of the Road.