OPINIONATOR

In early 2013, the Rev. Theresa S. Thames stumbled upon a Facebook page titled “GirlTrek: Healthy Black Women and Girls.”

“It saved my life,” she said.

Thames, then 33, was dangerously overweight and fighting depression. She sent the site her contact information and received an email from Vanessa Garrison, co-founder of GirlTrek, an organization that inspires black women to change their lives and communities by walking. Garrison learned that Thames was a pastor and invited her to lead a prayer at an event in Washington commemorating the 100th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s death.

“I was out there leading a prayer for this walking event in my 447-pound body and I felt like a fraud,” said Thames, who is the associate dean of religious life and the chapel at Princeton University. But she also found herself stirred by the spirit of the event.

“It wasn’t about looking good or weight loss or fitting into a certain type of clothing,” she recalled. “It wasn’t, ‘Hey, you fat person, you need to do this or you’re going to die.’ It was, ‘I love you and I want you to love yourself enough to invest in 30 minutes a day, to walk yourself to freedom like Harriet Tubman did.’ And that spoke deeply for me because my life work is showing up for other people, but I wasn’t showing up for myself.”

Thames completed the 100-minute walk that day. “My body was in pain,” she recalled. “But it felt good to be out there with other women. It was really encouraging because it was something I could do. So I committed to walking every day.”

She kept that promise. Over the past three years, she has lost more than 230 pounds. “I gained mental clarity and the resolve to take care of myself,” she said.

Thames is one of more than 58,000 women across the country who have joined GirlTrek’s movement and pledged to walk regularly in their neighborhoods and report their progress. There are tens of thousands of “solo trekkers” and 574 “trek teams” in more than 600 cities and towns. (Here is a map of coming treks.)

In the Forest Hill section of Jackson, Miss., for example, 15 to 20 women meet every weekday at 4:30 a.m. for a brisk walk. They call their team “Four Dark Thirty” (they meet before sunrise).

“It’s not a chore, it’s not exercise, it’s just going for a walk, and having a moment to reflect,” said Cynthia Thompson, an assistant director at Greater Bethlehem Temple Church, who is a volunteer city captain for GirlTrek in Jackson. “Some people in my church never had an in-depth conversation with each other until we started walking. It’s amazing the conversations that come up when you walk.”

A little west of Jackson, in Clinton, Miss., the Dynamic Divas of Clinton meet every day either before or after work. “It’s a lifeline for people,” said Kartessa Bell, an instructional coach at a public school and volunteer neighborhood captain. “Since they’ve been walking, one team member told me, she got off her depression medication. I’ve seen people growing more confident. One member went after a promotion at work.”

Each week, thousands of trekkers participate in “Superhero Saturday” walks. Groups of black women in bright blue T-shirts walking together have become regular features in hundreds of neighborhoods and parks.

The federal government’s guideline for adult physical activity recommends 30 minutes a day, five days a week. But there is a huge gap between guidelines and behavior. What makes GirlTrek so instructive is that it not only motivates people to be active on a significant scale, but that it does so with the statistically most sedentary subset of the population: black women, who have thehighest obesity rates in the country. (GirlTrek focuses on them because their need is highest, but the organization welcomes anyone.)

“We’ve spent an enormous amount of money on research-based approaches to obesity prevention and treatment, and almost none of them have worked with black women,” says Gary G. Bennett, a professor at Duke University and a leading researcher on obesity. “One of the key predictors of positive treatment outcomes is really high levels of engagement. I’ve been doing work on obesity as it affects medically vulnerable populations for 15 years, and I don’t know of anything in the scientific community or any public health campaigns that have been able to produce and sustain engagement around physical activity for black women like GirlTrek does. Not even close.”

Bennett was so impressed that he joined GirlTrek’s board, as did Dr. Regina Benjamin, a former United States surgeon general. Together, they lead a committee focused on research and evaluation of GirlTrek’s impact on health.

GirlTrek grew out of the experiences of its two founders, Vanessa Garrison and Morgan Dixon, friends from college days, and began as a simple act of self-care and love. Garrison grew up in Seattle. When she was 5, her mother started using heroin; she was an addict for 15 years and spent eight years in prison. Garrison was reared by her grandmother and aunt and recalls a lot of emotional pain in the household.

“So much was happening negatively for the women who raised me: depression, despair, sadness and loneliness,” she said. “I felt a lot of guilt, but I wasn’t able to give back to them in any substantial way.” She began walking as “a very personal way of how you can heal from childhood traumas.”