Rajiv Kumar said he wants more poor people to join Shape Up RI, and expects 15,000 participants in the program next year.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson Glenn Osmundson

Rajiv Kumar was stunned by what he was learning in his medical-school classes.

He’d had no idea how bad it was: Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and obesity affects every organ system, leading to disabling and deadly illnesses and costing the health-care system billions of dollars.

Yet, unlike so many diseases, obesity is both preventable and curable. “I thought of it as a solvable problem,” Kumar says.

So at the age of 22, in his first year of medical school at Brown University, Kumar set about trying to solve it.

What if people could be coaxed to join teams, competing over how much exercise they got or how much weight they lost? What if employers would sponsor the teams?

“I’ve always been the kind of person that likes to dream things up,” says Kumar.

Today, a crowd will gather at Rhode Island College to celebrate the results of Kumar’s dreaming: During a 16-week period this spring, some 7,000 Rhode Islanders lost more than 30,000 pounds and walked more than 2 million miles.

They did it through Kumar’s brainchild, a program called Shape Up RI, which today holds closing ceremonies for its second season. Teams of 5 to 11 people, paying $15 each, competed in one or more of these categories: percentage of body weight lost, number of hours spent exercising, or number of steps taken as measured by a pedometer.

Kumar says some of the success stories brought him to tears: People who had never exercised before now talking about triathlon training. A participant who got healthy enough to cancel gall-bladder surgery. People who said they’d turned their lives around.

“The competition gives people the impetus to finally take action,” Kumar says. “We didn’t do a whole lot for them. We created a structure, gave them a little bit of motivation, and we connected them to others.”

Kumar was talking about the genesis of Shape Up RI during a break from studying for his medical boards. Now 24, he has just completed the second year of medical school, always a rigorous course of study. How did someone so young and so busy manage to create and sustain a program like Shape Up RI?

“Rajiv is driven, I think, with this desire to save the world,” says Ray Rickman, a former state representative whom Kumar recruited as adviser to Shape Up RI and is now an employee of the organization. “I don’t know how he’s ever going to be a daily practicing doctor. He’s going to be wanting to save too many people at the same time.”

“Maybe his day isn’t 24 hours; maybe it’s 36,” jokes Robert Trachtenberg, associate director of Brown’s Area Health Education Center, a federally financed effort to promote primary care that provided a grant to Shape Up RI. “He seems very steady and calm and not overwhelmed by all the things he’s doing.”

Kumar comes from a family of doctors — about 30 of them, he says, including his mother, an internist — and he’s wanted to be a doctor since the age of 6. His sister just graduated from medical school.

But he also has an entrepreneurial side. As a high school student in Glastonbury, Conn., he developed an online business selling art prints. As an undergraduate at Brown (majoring in business and economics), he joined with Rickman to found Adopt-a-Doctor, a nonprofit company that supplements the salaries of 16 doctors in Africa.

Kumar loved working on Adopt-a-Doctor. “I thought that if I can do that for an issue that people don’t deal with every day, something like obesity would be easier,” he says. “It was.”

Kumar modeled Shape Up RI after a similar anti-obesity program in Iowa. To give his program some credibility, he asked prominent people to lend their names, recruiting as co-chairmen U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Rhode Island Hospital president Joseph F. Amaral, among others.

“Once I had those people on board, I gained legitimacy,” Kumar says. “Then what happened, we got employers interested. Obesity was named as the single greatest contributor to rising health-care costs.” Citizens Bank and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island were among the first to sponsor teams, paying the registration fee of any employee who wanted to participate.

Then Kumar persuaded UPN Channel 28 to run some free ads, and he sent a lot of e-mails. He and Rickman planned on enrolling 500 people.

More than 1,700 signed up the first season, spring of 2006.

“It just took off,” Rickman says. “It had a life of its own. People were calling. … Corporations were asking us to come for meetings.” Fearful of being overwhelmed in the first year, Rickman says, they turned away thousands of people and one corporation in 2006.

Participation for the 2007 season more than tripled, to 7,000, and Kumar expects 15,000 participants next year.

Now, he’s looking for ways to reach people who don’t work for big employers or use e-mail, especially poor people, among whom obesity is especially severe. A grant from Roger Williams Medical Center is financing meetings in churches and community centers, where Shape Up RI teaches people how to prepare healthful food. Plans are afoot for a school-based program.

And Kumar wants to reach one group that tends to ignore health messages: men. The participants in Shape Up RI are at least two-thirds female. Kumar hopes a softball tournament this summer and other sports-oriented projects will engage more men.

“I love meeting people and working with people,” says the doctor-to-be. “The participants are almost like my patients.”

ffreyer@projo.com