Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the weight management and weight maintenance challenges experienced by obese female university students through a support group that acted as an intervention programme. The study is a phenomenological research involving four female students of a public university in Malaysia who were having problems with weight loss. They were selected with three inclusion criteria: female, had a body mass index of ≥ 30 kgm-2 and was currently seeking or had previously tried a method of losing weight. Interview protocols were used to guide interaction in the support group, and data were collected from regular focus group discussions occurring in the support group, journal writing, and products of the support group activities. Verbatims were transcribed and “meaning units” were derived from significant overlapping ideas. Using the socio-ecological model, the challenges of weight management among the participants were identified to exist at the individual, interpersonal and community levels. Of these three, the individual level was noted to have the most prominent number of challenge factors caused by poor self-control and the participants’ psychological states. Various issues related to poor self-control were the most frequently occurring themes among the participants who wanted to lose weight. In view of the findings, counsellors, dietitians or healthcare providers need to consider counselling techniques that can empower clients to manage their thoughts and emotions effectively as this will increase their self-efficacy in self-control. Keywords: Weight loss, weight management, challenges in sustainable weight loss, poor self-control, sabotaging thoughts, socio-ecological model
Highlights
Overweight and obesity are issues that are expanding in current healthcare
Interested participants either called or sent text messages to the researcher to learn more about the weight loss support group programme
Low motivation as a barrier to weight management was mostly caused by the previous failure in weight loss attempts among the research participants
Summary
Overweight and obesity are issues that are expanding in current healthcare. Modern lifestyle that includes the consumption of fast food and processed food, and being sedentary contributes to this epidemic. Annual costs for obesity are estimated around $1.1 billion, €5.1 billion and $1 billion for the US, Germany and Canada, respectively (Tremmel et al, 2017). Malaysia was ranked the first among Southeast Asian countries with high adult obesity rate (Ng et al, 2014). The prevalence of overweight and obesity in Malaysia was 48.3% and 48.6% for men and women in the year 2013 (Ng et al, 2014). In 1996, the prevalence of adult obesity in Malaysia was only 4.4% of the population
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