Successful Weightloss by Eating and Exercising Together

Families with children are pressured from all angles: media advertising, difficulty finding safe places to play, and fighting the “Nintendo urge.” This pressure contributes to childhood obesity, an alarming problem especially among African-American and Latino children. Austin, a federally-qualified health center with years of experience initiating programs that improve health outcomes in the Mercer area, serves nearly 14,000 patients each year; recent data show that 20% of its child patients are overweight / obese. Yet parents with obese children have very few options for care, and parents with little economic means have virtually no options. Austin Center offers Successful Weight loss by Eating and Exercising Together in response to this unmet need.

SWEET is an innovative program that helps obese children and their family members lose weight and develop permanent healthy lifestyle changes. It provides an incentive-based program of on-site exercise, hands-on kitchen demonstrations and meal planning, behavior modification, and pediatric care. Integral to SWEET is the involvement of the child’s family members, caregivers, and meal planners.

SWEET helps participants achieve a healthy weight to height, or body-mass-index (BMI), ratio. The program empowers participants to feel a sense of personal ability and success using medical and psychosocial treatment that supports the cultural traditions and strengths of the child and his or her family. SWEET teaches all family members how to make healthy lifestyle changes by increasing their knowledge of, and interest in, nutrition and exercise and by demonstrating ways to integrate these changes into the family.

SWEET’s diverse, dynamic multidisciplinary team includes a part-time fitness expert, a registered dietitian, a behavior modification specialist, a pediatrician, a gastroenterologist, a child psychologist, and our Medical Director. It occurs primarily at the YWCA of Trenton, where Austin Center has entered into an exciting partnership. Each child in SWEET develops a personal points system to meet her/his goals and earns individually-chosen incentives (such as full-year gym membership). The child is monitored for psychosocial concerns and offered psychosocial treatment if needed. The behavior modification worker provides home visits to support the families and to share a meal with them; this enhances both staff-participant relationships and team assessment. Weekly activities that are active, physical, and fun encourage integrated change rather than isolated “exercise time.” The children and families attend evening nutritional and activity groups and personal appointments with SWEET staff.

For more information, please call (609) 396-0248