Obesity Management and Prevention
By empowering leaders across the state to work together, Well-Ahead is working to improve the health of our residents at every stage of life by promoting healthy living. This coordinated approach to tackling obesity helps our residents have the best possible chance to build healthy habits and avoid chronic diseases.
Obesity Impacts Your Overall Health
Life in Louisiana is hard to beat. But, our lifestyle has a big impact on obesity in our communities. Obesity is common, serious and expensive—affecting overall health, healthcare costs and workforce productivity. Obesity can lead to health conditions that last a lifetime, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. By coming together in a multifaceted approach, we can enact change and make a real difference.
36% of all Louisiana residents are obese, which can fill Tiger Stadium
11X1
1.4M+
of Louisiana residents have high blood pressure¹
43%
of Louisiana residents with heart disease are obese¹
In medical expenses each year, obesity costs the U.S. about
$147 billion2
Healthy Changes to Combat Obesity
Healthy living can be challenging. Not only because of tempting choices, but also because many of our residents are faced with health disparities. Most residents know how to be healthy, but that’s not enough. Our residents should be surrounded by practical, readily available healthy options. This means making active lifestyles and good nutrition a part of our culture by creating environments that support healthy choices.
That’s why Well-Ahead’s obesity efforts focus on policy, system and environmental strategies to make healthy living easily accessible for everyone. We focus on empowering leaders in child care, healthcare, school, worksite and community settings to make healthy changes in their environments to maintain a healthy weight. These changes include implementing evidence-based strategies like promoting the availability of healthy food options, creating opportunities for physically activity and increasing breastfeeding support.
Community Resource Guide
Our Community Resource Guide is a tool for communities to connect residents with no-cost resources available locally that help to make healthy living easier.
Early Childhood Health Promotion
This program helps early childcare and education settings implement policies and practices that build a foundation for healthy living at a young age to prevent obesity. It focuses on directly affecting what children eat and drink, how active they are, reducing screen time and supporting moms who breastfeed.
Louisiana Obesity and Diabetes Collaborative
The Louisiana Obesity and Diabetes Collaborative is a multi-sector group of community leaders that raises awareness about obesity, prediabetes and diabetes; and collaborates to coordinate prevention and management strategies.
Provider Education Network
The Provider Education Network is our tool for interacting with Louisiana’s healthcare system. It connects providers to tools, training and technical assistance to incorporate population health strategies and create linkages with communities to combat and manage chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease—of which obesity is a major contributing factor.
School Health Promotion
Well-Ahead connects schools to evidence-based resources to help students establish lifelong healthy behaviors to combat obesity. Our Healthy Schools Training Krewe provides hands-on professional development and training to implement healthy changes in schools.
WellSpot Designation
WellSpot Designation is our tool for impacting the burden of obesity in Louisiana’s communities. It educates and empowers organizations to implement evidence-based policy, systems and environmental changes tailored to their organization type.
Worksite Wellness
Implementing a worksite wellness program makes healthy living easier by supporting healthy behaviors like healthy eating, being physically active, managing stress and quitting tobacco in a workplace environment.
Citations
1 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2019.
2 CDC National Health Report Highlights, 2013. https://www.cdc.gov/healthreport/publications/compendium.pdf
Success Stories
Small changes can have a big impact in reducing the burden of obesity and moving Louisiana’s health forward.
Northeast Children’s Coalition Encourages Child Care Centers to Become WellSpots
The Children’s Coalition for Northeast Louisiana knows that investing early in the health and development of Louisiana’s children results in much better development later, and that’s one of the reasons they are proud to be a WellSpot. “The childhood obesity problem in Louisiana is critical,” said then-executive director of the Coalition Lynn Clark. “It falls …
Louisiana Selected to be a Part of National Association of Chronic Disease Directors’ Employer Coverage Learning Collaborative
In October 2019, Louisiana was one of six states selected by the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) to be a part of the National Diabetes Prevention Program (National DPP) Employer Coverage Learning Collaborative. This cohort pilot opportunity was made available to a limited number of employers that expressed interest in, and readiness to, …