Empowering Healthy Lifestyle Behaviour Through Personalized Intervention Portfolios to Prevent and Control Obesity During Vulnerable Stages of Life: The HealthyW8 Project.

HealthyW8 will enhance early screening and prevention of obesity by making the scientific and technological breakthroughs necessary to support evidence-based clinical, environmental and policy-level decisions, while also directly empowering citizens to adopt healthy and sustainable lifestyle behaviours in a "push-pull" approach.

HealthyW8 will step up primary obesity prevention efforts across Europe, endowing them with a multi-disciplinary portfolio approach, i.e. a set of selective multi-component interventions that combine a large set of interventions and implementation options, focussing on diet, physical activity (PA), and psycho-emotional aspects.

The current approach considers obesity as a multifactorial phenomenon, necessitating a holistic, systemic approach accounting for the complexity of individual, interpersonal, organisational, community and public policy levels, as mutually reinforcing and supportive systems.

The attention will be focused on pivotal situations of transitions in the life-trajectory of individuals, which pose an elevated risk to progress from healthy weight to overweight and obesity, i.e. windows of opportunity to reduce the risk of developing obesity where the impact will have most leverage.

HealthyW8 targets vulnerable populations where transitional changes of lifestyle appear to be dominant: primary schoolchildren (5-12y, with active parent involvement), young adults (18-25y), and the elderly (>65y).