Swap It - a great new Health Promotion Campaign

Occasionally the Australian Government gets their living healthy Health Promotion Campaigns so right and this latest on is a really good example.

The "Swap it" Campaign aims to encourage and remind people that making healthy choices doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach. You can swap your regular habits for small changes and in time these will achieve two things:

1) You small changes will become integrated into you lifestyle and become the norm
2) Every little thing you do to make a healthier choice adds up together to make a big difference.

Sure you might have dreams of running the London Marathon one day - but first up you might need to start off by running around your block and then ticking that off as a goal achieved before moving onto bigger goals.

Breaking new habits down into small achievable goals is key in achieving real long term change and nailing those big long term goals.

The last time I felt like the government did a good job of spending taxpayer dollars on a Social Marketing campaign was the "Go for Two and Five" campaign that encourages Australians to eat two servings of fruit and five servings of vegetables every day.

This is one that has really stuck with me - and while I don't need encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle I do believe in following messages that are aimed at making the goal of having a healthy lifestyle easier.

I lke being able to have that as an achievement for the day - knowing that I have have my diet for the day made up from a good proportion of fruit and vegetables. I also found it so helpful to learn about serving sizes of vegetable intake via the  "Go for Two and Five" campaign.

Health promotion is an interest area of mine and I studied in as a minor in my masters degree. It is great to see that occasionally the Social Marketing people think outside the square and aim their messages at lifestyle change rather than the fear mongering that we see so very often!