Waco residency program develops project to address childhood obesity

The Waco Family Medicine Residency Program has been awarded an AAFP grant to develop a family-centered, community project designed to reduce childhood obesity and promote fitness. The grant comes through AAFP’s Americans In Motion − Healthy Interventions, or AIM-HI, initiative, which positions fitness through physical activity, nutrition, and emotional well-being as the treatment of choice for the prevention and management of many chronic conditions.

AAFP awarded nine grants to residency programs across the country and encouraged them to tailor their project to the needs of their individual community. The Academy hopes this grant program will enhance the training of family medicine residents in promoting healthy lifestyles.

The Waco Fit and Healthy Families program will encourage and enable community families to become healthier and more fit through monthly family group medical visits and healthy living workshops on nutrition, physical activity, and emotional well-being.

Program faculty saw particular need in the Waco community. A 2006 study of the program’s pediatric population found that one-third of children ages 2-18 were obese and another 18 percent were overweight. Their project aims to target this issue through family intervention using resources already in place in the community.

AIM-HI offers physicians three primary tools to help patients follow a healthy lifestyle: a fitness inventory, which gauges a patient’s confidence about their fitness and their readiness to change; a food and activity journal, which helps patients track healthy eating, physical activity, and emotional well-being lifestyle behaviors; and a fitness prescription, through which the patient and the physician establish goals that are assessed periodically.

Proponents believe this approach creates physician-patient relationships that lead to behavior changes that result in better health.