Almost half of Houston’s fourth-graders are overweight or obese. Cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes—all once confined primarily to older adults—are beginning to show up in these children with greater frequency. Unless they have a serious medical condition, most children do not need to see a doctor, take medicine or enroll in an expensive hospital wellness program to counter obesity. Instead, they can go with their families to the Young Men’s Christian Association of Greater Houston Area (YMCA) and sign up for MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition, Do It!), a fun-filled healthy lifestyle program that has proved it can change behavior through play, facilitated parent-child interactions and activities such as sleuthing through grocery stores with magnifying glasses to discover on package labels what’s in the food they eat.

Families attend the free MEND program twice a week for 10 weeks, learning about “healthy eating and active living,” says MEND director Chris Calitz. “We see children make great changes: self-esteem, fitness levels and family commitment improve, and their body mass index falls or stabilizes.” He explains, “This is not a clinical treatment program or a diet. We’re delivering a healthy lifestyle curriculum to parents and children in a supportive community setting.” The program, initiated in 2001 and recently offered in Houston after going through clinical trials, has proven to be very effective.

Each program session is divided into two parts: discussion and play. During discussions, a trained facilitator helps parents and children learn together. They establish nutrition and physical activity goals, become aware of unhealthy triggers and discover better ways to communicate. “We give families tools to work together as a team rather than being at loggerheads and fighting over food,” says Calitz. After the discussion, parents stay together and talk about the challenges of changing behaviors at home while kids participate in physically active games, learning that exercise can be fun. Calitz explains, “Physical exercise is never used as punishment, and nobody is ever left out. The kids increase their activity level each time and leave feeling good about themselves. We show them how to play again.”

MEND will expand in Houston from three to 45 programs during the next two years. “We train lay people to deliver the program, so capacity can be built at YMCAs, recreation centers and other community-based organizations,” says Calitz. “Given the scale of the obesity epidemic, it’s essential that we deliver evidence-based programs in community settings and empower people to take responsibility for their health and wellness.”