Press Release

April 18, 2006
Contact: Kaylyn Kendall Dines
Phone: (973) 972-3000
dineskd@umdnj.edu

UMDNJ, Kean University to Put Spring in Your Heart
Healthy Together Event April 23
- UMDNJ’s Dr. Jeff Levine, featured on TV’s The Biggest Loser, will speak-

UNION - Children and adults will have an opportunity to play games and participate in health education sessions during the “Healthy Together” event that is sponsored by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Kean University to combat childhood obesity. The event will take place on Sunday, April 23, at 1 p.m., at Kean’s Harwood Arena, 1000 Morris Avenue, Union.

Family members of all ages are encouraged to participate in the educational sessions and sports. Home run derby, basketball drills, relay races, yoga and martial arts are among the games and activities that will be offered. Participants must wear sneakers.

Dr. Jeff Levine, associate professor of family medicine at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and a contestant on NBC-TV’s The Biggest Loser, will be the keynote speaker. Levine, of Hillsborough, N.J., is a family physician who once carried 370 pounds on his 6-foot 1-inch frame before becoming a contestant on The Biggest Loser, a reality TV show in which overweight participants competed to lose the greatest percentage of body weight by the end of the television season. Believing that he had lost credibility with his patients, Levine dropped 153 pounds, and though he did not ultimately win the show ’s top prize. He is now a fit 217 pounds after 41 percent of his total body weight.

Levine will be joined by four additional speakers from the field of health, including two physicians. Since space is limited for the speaker sessions. All participants for Put Spring in Your Heart must register at Kean’s Harwood Arena beginning at 1 p.m. Please R.S.V.P. at www.kean.edu/~healthy.

More than 5,000 children and parents attended the partnership’s last event, Healthy Halloween, on October 30.

UMDNJ is the nation’s largest free-standing public health sciences university with more than 5,500 students attending the state's three medical schools, its only dental school, a graduate school of biomedical sciences, a school of health related professions, a school of nursing and a school of public health on five campuses. Annually, there are more than two million patient visits at UMDNJ facilities and faculty at campuses in Newark, New Brunswick/Piscataway, Scotch Plains, Camden and Stratford. UMDNJ operates University Hospital, a Level I Trauma Center in Newark, and University Behavioral HealthCare, a mental health and addiction services network.