Understanding health behaviour change within the context of the modern environment: implications for obesity self-management

Obesity is a complex chronic condition that develops for both individual and environmental reasons and is now considered a global epidemic. Traditionally, approaches to improve the prevalence of obesity have been individually focused and have had limited success in sustained weight loss. We now understand that our modern environments, with their cheap energy dense foods and labour saving technologies, have created an enormous challenge for maintaining energy balance. Therefore we need to develop and test more sophisticated health behaviour theories that account for social environmental influences on behaviour. Social cognitive theory (SCT) holds a great deal of promise to help us better understand weight related health behaviours, however the application of this theory is vastly understudied in overweight or obese adults. This research will embrace the complex nature of obesity and investigate the predictive ability of SCT as it relates to healthy eating, physical activity and body fat composition. By applying SCT to weight related health behaviours we will better understand not only the cognitive aspects of weight related health behaviour but the social environmental aspects as well. This could help researchers to design improved self-management programs, population health interventions or inform environmental level policy changes to best support individual level behaviour change, resulting a more sustained healthy living.