Reducing the size of the obesity problem

For many of us, the New Year is a time for reinventing ourselves. Why not change career, move house or go on that once in a lifetime holiday? For some it’s a chance to live healthier and lose weight.

However, with the increasing number of unhealthy food options, larger portion sizes and a decrease in exercise, it seems harder than ever to shed those pounds. We are arguably facing an obesity epidemic; over half of the UK adult population could be obese by 2050, costing the NHS £10bn a year according to the government’s recent Foresight Obesity Report.

Southampton Connects speaks to alumna Eileen Gorrod, a retired GP, about the effects of obesity on the body, and alumna Dr Judith Joseph, Senior Research-Enterprise Fellow in Psychology, to discover one of the ways research at Southampton is helping people help themselves to lose weight.

Eileen Gorrod (BM Medicine, 1977) General Practitioner 1980­–2016:

During my time in practice, more and more patients were presenting with medical problems associated with being overweight or obese. My experience is that people are eating larger portions and are introduced to high-fat, high-calorie snacks at a much earlier age. Children’s lunch boxes regularly contain crisps and confectionary. In addition we are all less active, leading to the obesity epidemic.

The physical effects of obesity on the body are many. The most obvious and well documented is the increased risk of type 2 diabetes; not only do more people get the disease now, but it is also harder to treat as the body becomes resistant to its own insulin. If we don’t make significant lifestyle changes, more than five million people in the UK will have type 2 diabetes by 2025, according to Diabetes UK.

Many people don’t realise that second to smoking, obesity is the biggest cause of cancers of various sorts, because fat cells upset the way that the immune system fights off cancer. Some arthritis and back problems are a result of being overweight as a lot of pressure is put on joints such as the knees.

Obesity also increases the risk of heart disease.

The end result to all of these medical conditions is that more strain is put on an already stretched NHS. Yet even a five per cent reduction in weight will result in health benefits.

In my opinion, when looking for techniques and self-help interventions for losing weight, people need to keep it simple. What is your realistic target weight; how do you eat and exercise now; and how can you change this to achieve your target? Even with all the publicity around healthy eating, people are just unaware of what it really means, which is why the project described below is so important.

Dr Judith Joseph (PhD in Human Factors, 2008) Senior Research-Enterprise Fellow in Psychology; member of the Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology Group:

At the University, my colleagues and I develop interactive health-related behaviour change interventions and our LifeGuide research programme has attracted over £50m in funding over the last 10 years.

Our Group’s POWeR (Positive Online Weight Reduction) intervention has caught the attention of health professionals across the UK, and is currently being made available to over two million people by Hampshire County Council and other organisations.

The POWeR intervention is based on the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines for weight management and was carefully developed with users to ensure it is accessible, engaging and effective for a wide-range of people, including different genders, ages and education levels, with or without long-term health conditions.

Users log on weekly to track their weight, set and review their eating and physical activity goals, and receive automated personalised advice based on their progress. They can choose from sessions providing advice and support for behavioural change, including: POWeR tools – behaviour change techniques; and POWeR stories – examples of how other people have successfully changed their behaviour using these methods.

In a large trial, 30 per cent of people that used POWeR were able to lose a clinically important amount of weight (five per cent – sufficient to halve the incidence of diabetes) 12 months after starting to use the intervention, with minimal support – just three emails and one brief phone call during the year from a practice nurse.

We have been awarded funding from Innovate UK to develop POWeR into an app, and we are now working with Changing Health, an SME that provides digital interventions for diabetes management to the NHS. The POWeR content has been integrated into their diabetes app and will shortly be made available to the general public through the NHS.

We are really pleased that POWeR is already helping so many people and will reach even more users once rolled out by Changing Health. This is the reason we work so hard to develop interventions that are effective and make a real difference to those that need it.

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