Watch out Michelle Obama, you may have found yourself a hula-hooping rival.
Dan Glickman, the former Congressman, Agriculture Secretary and Motion Picture Association of America head, found a home last year at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He’s currently working on the center’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative in an attemp to combat America’s chubby waistlines. During a trip to tour athletic facilities in Salt Lake City earlier this month, he dared to hula hoop, though he admitted there’s no way he could really best first lady Michelle Obama, who famously hula hooped on the South Lawn of the White House.
“I’m sure she would whoop me, she would embarrass me with her skills, because if you saw that picture you didn’t see that hula hoop fall to the ground in record time,” he told Yeas & Nays.
Besides shaking his hips, Glickman — along with three other former cabinet members, Mike Leavitt, Donna Shalala and Ann Veneman — are traveling and talking to an array of experts to find some bipartisan solutions in the areas of nutrition and physical activity. They hope to have recommendations ready by early next year and then they’ll study how to implement them. “We’re not really focusing, per say, on government solutions,” Glickman explained. “The government is part of it, but so is the workplace, so is the family and while we’re looking at kids, we’re looking at adults too.”
In looking to adults, Glickman is working on himself, too. “You know, let’s put it like this, my weight is slightly in excess of where it should be, ‘slightly’ is my terminology, maybe not my wife’s,” he said. “But I do go on the treadmill four or five days a week for 35 to 40 minutes, I try to watch my food, as you get older it gets harder.”
