Policing’s unspoken issue

LABOUR: Some officers struggle with weight gain, hypertension

TORONTO — Gun- toting criminals and hypertension share one thing in common.

They can be counted as two of the several risks that police officers encounter on the job.

When John Cilia first joined Toronto Police in 1980, his weight — 230 or so pounds, for a man standing around 6-foot-5 — was the last thing on his mind.

By the time he retired four years ago, he was “about 140 pounds heavier.”

“I never really worried about it until my health started to suffer,” Cilia, 57, told Postmedia Network. “My health started to get lousy in my mid-40s, late-40s.”

He says he developed atrial fibrillation.

“First I got overweight, then I developed sleep apnea, then that ... hurt my heart,” he explained.

The nature of police work means officers sometimes find themselves waking up at an ungodly hour to commence a shift, then sitting at a desk or in a patrol car for hours before breaking into a run or quickly escalating activity.

“It’s not like TV where we’re running and chasing after bad guys over fences and walls all day long,” Cilia said. “There’s a lot of sitting in it.”

At times there’s a lot of fast food consumed out on the road. Other times, officers can go “whole shifts” without eating a single thing, Cilia said.

“It just seems like once you passed your physical, when you started the job, you got in, and then after that you do what you want to do,” he said.

“You just look around and you can see that there’s tons of overweight policemen.”

It got to the point that he didn’t want to “feel like crap anymore.” He joined Harvey Brooker’s weight loss program this year and has lost 40 pounds so far.

Brooker said that he has seen two dozen or so officers join his program over the years after struggling with their weight.

“I’m not getting young cops in here because they’re still on the job, but I am getting guys in retirement ... and they’re all overweight,” he said.

A search for recent statistics specifically on obesity and Canadian law enforcement came up empty.

The last time officers were in the news for their weight was 2006 when a survey of more than 2,100 Toronto Police workers showed that almost two-thirds reported themselves as overweight.

Weight appears to be an unspoken issue, Cilia said: “It’s not on anybody’s radar at all.”

It’s on Kim McClelland’s radar, though.

At 59, she still takes the voluntary fitness test at the Toronto Police Service every year to qualify for what they call a fitness pin.

A registered nurse who has worked as a wellness co-ordinator with Toronto officers for the past 12 years, McClelland says that by her observations, about 90% of the force “nowadays are fit.”

“There’s just a higher awareness, they know the risks, and because we’ve been educating them over the years, many more officers are fit,” she said.

The force also has a full-time nutritionist on staff and a fitness co-ordinator.

McClelland acknowledged shift work does mean that officers are vulnerable to high blood pressure and hypertension.

“You do see a higher incidence of heart attacks than the general population,” she said.

But all the resources in the world won’t have an impact unless people use them.

“We’re trying to inform peo- ple and then they have to make the choices themselves about how they’re going to manage it,” McClelland said.