Curbing the Rise in Overweight and Obesity

Running head: CURBING THE RISE IN OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY 1
Curbing the Rise in Overweight and Obesity
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CURBING THE RISE IN OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY 2
Assessing the Needs
Obesity is a health menace that has affected the Australian population especially the children and
the adolescents for a very long time. It is usually because of many complex, systems that are
made by human being including but not limited to supply of food, transport, urban design, and
governance system. All these factors have the potential to be re-oriented to make better
populations and environments.
According to WHO (2018), the reports highlight that overweight and obesity are becoming a
significant health issue. Overweight and obesity can bring a range of health issues to human
wellbeing such as Diabetes, Stroke, Coronary Artery disease and other vascular events which can
result to drastic health issues to humans (World, 2018). Surprisingly obesity and overweight is
becoming much common among children (under 5) and adolescents (5-15) because of the
improper nutrition patterns, lack of physical activities and increase the use of TV games and
computer games so that they are dominated by sedentary lifestyle (World, 2018). Reports reveal
that over 340 million children and adolescents were overweight or obese, and the distribution is
the same among both boys and girls.
In Western Australia, Childhood obesity remains a tragedy since 2004 and a significant amount
of 241 million spent on the issue. WA (2017) estimates that this would double to 488.4 million
by 2021. Obesity is a preventable disease and implementations are quite easy to apply on a
targeted group and cost effective such as increasing physical activity and diet controlling
measures (World, 2018).
According to WA (2017), in 2015, 67% of the adults having the age of 16 years and above were
categorized as overweight- 40% and obese accounting for 27%. This was dependent upon height

CURBING THE RISE IN OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY 3
and weight. The statistics also show that the males were at a higher probability of becoming
obese or overweight compared to the females. The overweight and obese rates have significantly
increased over the years, driven by a general elevation in the body mass index. On the other
hand, in the same year, 22% of children aged between 5-15 years were categorized as
overweight-16% or obese-6%. Over the last decade, the statics show that the rate of children who
are overweight or obese have relatively remained stable. The rate of overweight or obese was
required to be higher among individuals living in remote or rural areas, a number of overseas
born populations and people found to have profound disability
WA (2017) note that a healthy diet has significant contribution to maintaining a healthy weight
and lifestyle, however, a significant number of people in western Australia are rarely consuming
a diet recommended by Australian dietary guidelines. The statistics also shows that way back in
2011 and 2012, the Australian population got over one third of the energy from food and drinks
that are discretionary. More than a half of the Australian populations were recorded to have
exceeded the WHO recommendations regarding sugars intake having around half of the sugars
consumed coming from beverages such as soft drinks.
A sedentary lifestyle was also recorded to significantly contribute to obesity and overweight.
Close to 40% individuals were found not to have sufficiently active and 43 % was recorded to be
spending most of their time during the day sitting and relaxing (WA, 2017)
The target group is a group of young children under 5 years and adolescents up to 16 years. It has
been recorded that there is significant number of children below 5 years and even adolescents up
to age 16 years that are immensely struggling with the obese menace if not overweight
(McCalman et al., 2017). The reason why such a program evaluation for this specific group of
individuals is because it is a very sensitive age that holds the future of western Australia. If this

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groups of individuals are not helped today, the future of the nation will be in a mess and
problems. The reason why it is the most prudent thing to consider the group is because
significant number of those who have had obesity ended up developing very serious
complications like cardiovascular diseases while they are very young. The essence to have this
issue being addressed is to help bring prosperity not just today but also tomorrow and the rest of
the day they will stay alive (WA, 2017).
Some of the behavioral factors that would contribute to the condition according to Brand-Miller,
and Barclay (2017) are poor eating habits, poor eating habit as noted by Lobstein et al. (2015) is
eating behavior that do not confirm to the eating dietary guideline. For example, concentrating
more on eating processed food and forgetting the most essential food supplements that carry
large amount of nutrient that is essential for the body development.
Setting the Goal
The proposed program that has a potential of becoming instrumental in addressing this issue is
ensuring that all the children under 5 years are monitored from the time they are born to the time
they get to weaning stage and to five years of age. This would involve monitoring on their body
weight and the rightful amount and type of food they eat (Macvean, Shlonsky, Mildon & Devine,
2017). This could be made possible by booking appointments in hospitals for every mother that
delivers in a hospital. It would serve best if the monitoring will be conducted from the home set
up especially after basic treatments have been done (Tsiros & Shultz, 2019). For the adolescents
up to 16 years, there will be a need to organize school educational programs that will be more
practical than just theoretical. For example, during the educational programs, the educating
officers should consider developing the habit into the young people’s lives by carrying along the
kind of the food they require them to eat (Peirson et al., 2015). It will serve as an example of the