Designing a Lifestyle Program for Adolescents from Middle Eastern Backgrounds

Abstract

Halting the rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents is a key priority, to ensure healthy behaviours are entrenched and co-morbidities minimised during this transitory period into adulthood. Moreover, the burden of overweight and obesity is not equally distributed, but concentrated in ethnic minorities from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, including adolescents from Middle Eastern backgrounds. While a plethora of efforts have been dedicated to tackling the obesity pandemic in children, co-designed, culturally responsive and equity-based responses to shift the ethnic and socio-economic gradient of obesity and generate population-level differences have been scarce. Acknowledging the need for upstream policies to mitigate and ‘close the gap’, grassroots efforts are still important to understand and serve at-risk communities and help translate research to priority populations. Hence, this thesis seeks to produce the formative research to inform the co-design of a lifestyle program that is championed by the Middle Eastern community in New South Wales, Australia, for the prevention of overweight and obesity in adolescents.