In Grade 2, Mark Yee discovered Hungry Man fried-chicken frozen dinners. Each day after school, his mom would drop him off at home and go back to work, leaving Yee to entertain himself. As they lived on the outskirts of their small B.C. town, he didn’t have buddies close by to chum around with—let alone a soccer or basketball team to belong to—so he made friends with food. He’d cook and eat one dinner when he got home, and he’d eat dinner again when his mom and dad came home.

By the time he was 12, Yee was a chunky 180 pounds. He was the third-largest in his class—and he says that the three “fat kids” hung out together.

“Basically, it was childhood obesity,” he recalled in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight. “Not by today’s standards; kids are huge now. But 30 years ago, I was pretty big.”

So what about gym class, the government’s opportunity to steer kids like Yee toward a lifetime of fitness? For Yee, it was “horrible”, a chance for others to tease him and his friends. The teacher used to tell the kids to “go for a run”, something Yee simply could not do. Trials like that made him want to exercise less, not more.

“It’s like reading,” he reflected. “If you find reading difficult or you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to pick up a book. If you’re not successful in sports because you’re constantly competing with kids who are better than you, you’re not going to want to do it.”

For Yee, the summer between grades 9 and 10 was a turning point. That fall, he was going to a private boarding school with a top rugby team, and he wanted to play rugby, in which size can be an advantage. At his parents’ magazine store, he picked up a copy of a fitness magazine that featured an abdominal workout recommended by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (This was the 1980s.)

That summer, by himself, he exercised his way from a 38-inch waist to a 30-inch waist and dropped 15 pounds.

Ten years later, as a UBC student, he was bodybuilding and power-lifting competitively. During that single teenage summer—thanks to Schwarzenegger, not gym class—Yee changed his body for good.

This kind of fitness turnaround is something all levels of government would be happy to see happen nationwide. According to the 2007 House of Commons report Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids, 26 percent of Canadians aged two through 17 were overweight or obese, compared to 15 percent in 1978. The same report stated: “Most Canadian children do not participate in the 90 minutes per day of moderate activity (e.g., walking) or vigorous activity (e.g., running, climbing, swimming), as recommended by Canada’s Physical Activity Guides for Children and Youth.”

The million-dollar question is this: how can bureaucrats and politicians make an increasingly inactive and overweight teenage population snap out of it?

The sheer number of programs aimed at teens who are like Yee’s younger self is staggering. Federally, there’s the revived ParticipACTION program and the Children’s Fitness Tax Credit. Provincially, there’s the ActNow B.C. program, which requires all kindergarten to Grade 9 students to complete 30 minutes of at least moderate activity per day. Grades 10 through 12 students need to complete 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per week as part of their graduation requirements. Monitoring practices vary between schools.

Schools can also join Action Schools! B.C. and make plans to encourage students to exercise more and eat more healthily.

So are kids becoming more active? Studies by B.C.’s Directorate of Agencies for School Health don’t make a clear case that the programs are helping inactive kids. For example, an on-line case study of Surrey’s Johnston Heights secondary school reported that a “Wellness Week” was aimed at Grade 9 students. It included having students monitor their exercise results over a term with regard to cardio endurance, core strength, flexibility, and agility. Do these initiatives specifically help inactive kids? The report doesn’t say—though that’s exactly what it is designed to do.

To Dunbar mom and triathlete Michelle Larigakis, these kinds of forced, chorelike measures seem doomed. This year, she started GirlSquad, a noncompetitive out-of-school program designed for students who are not connecting with school-based physical education. To prepare for the launch of her business, she hosted multiple focus groups with teenage girls and asked them what was missing in schools.

“The teens told us the daily physical activities are a joke,” she told the Straight in a phone interview. “The parents just sign a form saying their child has walked to school or whatever. I asked a principal about it and he said, ”˜We trust our students.’ So there’s no recourse, no motivation for teens to do anything.”

Larigakis argued that by high school, it’s too late for the institution to coerce nonactive kids into becoming active. Six-year-olds, she said, will do what they’re told. A 15-year-old will not.

“It’s about turning kids on,” she said, noting that the only way to truly motivate a teen is to make exercise fun. Thus, her sessions include sports such as standup paddling, Frisbee games, and skimboarding. “If you can get a kid on a climbing wall, maybe they’ll say, ”˜Yeah, I can see myself doing this.’ It’s like food: if a kid is going to eat nutritious food, you have to make it taste good.”

Even for adults, fun is the key, according to Burnaby-based personal trainer Byron Collyer. He sees hundreds of clients who went through high-school gym class and didn’t find a lifelong fitness solution. As adults, they hire him to teach them what gym class failed to.

About a third of his clients, he told the Straight in a phone interview, are getting fit for the very first time. The biggest hurdle for those who aren’t predisposed to enjoy exercise, he said, is intellectual.

“They want to know what’s the least they can do to get results,” he said. “If you’re dealing with an athlete, you’ll tell them to work out four days and they’ll do six. [Nonathletes] often don’t believe they’ll actually change.”

Collyer trained to become a high-school physical-education teacher. While at UBC, he helped teach gym at a Vancouver high school and was dismayed by what he saw.

“All the teacher did was crowd control and try to motivate the kids who didn’t want to be there,” he recalled. “The teacher told me he wished he’d become a math teacher: a class that students take seriously and they make a good effort. His class was just a gong show. People were everywhere. The experience turned me on a dime. I want to be with people who are as passionate as I am.”

After a decade of successfully training gym-class flunkers, his advice to high schools is simple: make it fun.

But Yee has a more controversial suggestion: stream high-school students by fitness level (as some schools do with math and English), and help the obese and unfit students become fitter in ways that are appropriate for their level. In other words, don’t set them up for failure against the jocks.

Top-down school-based approaches won’t work with inactive teens, Yee argues. Being out of shape, he said, is like an addiction: “A person is not going to fix it until they want to fix it.”