Building Healthy Families

 

 

Building Healthy Families (BHF) is a family- based healthy weight program for children and their families. Key behavior change strategies including goal setting for both lifestyle modification and weight loss, self-monitoring, rewards/contingency management, role modeling, and stimulus control/ modifying the environment.

Building Healthy Families has demonstrated success for both children and adults. Children with obesity have lost more than 5% of their body mass in twelve weeks while adult weight loss has averaged 14 lbs in 12 weeks with some losing up to 40 lbs.

Building Healthy Families has been packaged for other small, or rural communities to implement. Our approach was to develop a package for communities that may not have the full range of expertise but have strong interest in addressing the issue.

Our packaged BHF program includes online training resources and implementation strategies for community implementation teams to successfully implement the program in their community. Online training modules were created for each implementation team role including; program coordinator and nutrition, physical activity, lifestyle and recruitment coordinators. The packaged program includes presentation materials, handouts, and lesson plans that increase the likelihood that the delivery of the program will be consistent across communities. The Online Training  and Program Resources includes a modular approach providing training modules for program facilitators, knowledge checks to ensure mastery of program components, recruitment resources for community, school and clinical settings, all delivery materials, embedded fidelity assessments for quality assurance, and a data portal to track participant success.