Developing a Healthy Lifestyle

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“Developing a Healthy Lifestyle” is a new innovative KA1 Erasmus+ Youth exchange for youth workers, volunteers and youth leaders. It brought together 41 participants from 6 different countries to work together on the main topics: healthy living and social exclusion in relation to the problems of youth health and inclusion. The idea of the exchange was driven by the discussions between partner organizations while they revealed lack of healthy lifestyle and social exclusion as common problems that impact young people in our local communities. That is why we decided to focus on these topics by raising awareness and improving the capacity of female and male youngsters from UK, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Czech Republic and Macedonia to develop new attitudes in favor of healthy lifestyle thereby addressing the issue.
Life expectancy in Europe has increased during recent decades due to better living standards and good medical care. But, at the same time, physical inactivity, increasing tobacco use, excessive consumption of alcohol and poor diet and nutrition, are increasingly becoming part of today’s lifestyle leading to the rapid rise of diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, or obesity. Nowadays in Europe overweight affects about 50% and obesity 20% of the population, among which Eastern Europe is one of the most affected areas. In addition, further changes in lifestyle during recent decades such as: stress, the overuse of sedentary entertainment (television, computers, cell phones, and videogames, and the lack of face to face communication have had negative impacts on British, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Czech and Macedonian youth.

Besides health damage, this current lifestyle trend of less physical activity decreases opportunities for socialization, networking and cultural identity, which itself supports social exclusion of youngsters. Young people face social exclusion for several reasons, including national, economic, religious, cultural background and while being or feeling socially excluded, people tend to keep themselves away from the “different” majority peers. The aforementioned situation brings several problems to their life, such as sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy nutritional habits, and lack of exercise and other related unhealthy behaviours.

In other words, most often, socially excluded young people tend to become physically and socially inactive.
Based on the aforementioned facts, we decided to focus on the root of the problem – ignorance about healthy habits, which is related to the motivation of living healthily. To promote the healthy lifestyle, we aimed at raising awareness and building the capacity of female and male youngsters from participant countries so that they are better able to utilize and popularize it back to their communities through methods of peer-to-peer education.

Youth Exchange “Developing a Healthy Lifestyle” During the 7 days program, is aimed to create a space for young people to meet, share, and extend their current knowledge and skills and to acquire new ones with regards to health, disease, sports, social inclusion and generally about healthy lifestyle.
The project objectives also corresponded with the objectives of the Erasmus+ programme and the specific key action:
We believe that the “Developing a Healthy Lifestyle” project corresponds the overall objectives of the framework for European cooperation in the youth field (2010-2018) through promoting active citizenship, social inclusion and solidarity. It also improved the quality and efficiency of education and training through developing key competencies of participants and supports lifelong learning and mobility under the objectives of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (ET 2020). The project also contributed development the European dimension in sport, in particular, grassroots sport through promoting healthy lifestyle among participants and local communities. Besides all mentioned, project promoted active citizenship and intercultural dialogue enhances the international dimension of youth activities and strengthens cooperation in between Programme and Partner Countries.
Moreover, participants increased their ability for idea generation and implementation during the project. They discovered the pleasure of working together to develop the feeling of having a team spirit. The participants who worked together in different activities and whose adaptation was provided eliminated the prejudices. The youngsters had more interest in social activities and were more interested in helping other youth to take more actively part in social processes. Besides, the language, which was used continuously at the sessions, was English. English communication skills of the participants who spoke to each other continuously in English improved.