It's fair to say that Zumba is somewhat of a contagious fitness craze. Since the Latin-inspired dance class came to the UK countless venues have opened up to a mass of fans who want to shimmy and shake their way to a better body. With an infectious soundtrack at every class and a fun party atmosphere that doesn't feel like gruelling exercise, it's transformed the way women, and even men, have approached their fitness regimes.
Now the people behind Zumba Fitness are doing their bit not just to reduce our waistlines, but to help the polar opposite; those who are suffering with hunger around the world. With The Great Calorie Drive, Zumba is urging everyone to donate their calories with the tagline 'Don't just burn calories, donate them'.
By simply checking in whenever you attend a class using the free Zumba Fitness app, you can donate 750 calories - the average amount burned per class - to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and help stave off starvation. Essentially, for every class you attend and check in to, the fitness fanatics will give one healthy meal to the WFP.
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Whether you're a Zumba fan or not, the concept is a brilliant one. Every day here in the UK we are confronted with tips on how to eat healthily, how to shed those pounds to get to an optimum, healthy weight and how to reduce the obesity crisis; even here at GTG one of our most popular features is how to do the 5:2 diet and our latest Project Bikini guide because so many of us want to shift the extra pounds and shape up. So it's very humbling to think that while we're always dealing with excess as if it's a chore, there are others who don't even have enough food to survive - which makes the Great Calorie Drive a pretty smart idea to redress that balance. One in eight people around the world do not have enough to eat; that's more than 850 million people.
“Hunger is one of the world’s greatest solvable problems,” said Alberto Perlman, co-founder and CEO of Zumba Fitness. “While many fight to burn calories, others suffer from hunger. The Zumba network is in a unique position to tip the scales in the right direction, and we expect to touch millions of lives.”