The bottom line: Tackling obesity - just do it!

To many, the 'obesity epidemic' is an abstract concept: a public health priority and yet not one with which they particularly identify.

To me it's a personal issue which led in the first instance to my choice of career - as a specialist paediatric dietitian - and then to my decision to co-found MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition...Do it!), a specialist obesity prevention and treatment organisation.

During my teens, my weight spiralled out of control to the point where I was clinically obese, miserable and frustrated.  My self-esteem plummeted and as I consoled myself with unhealthy snacks and computer games I found it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to do any sport at school  and my weight continued to spiral. I was lucky to find a way to break the cycle when I left home for university, but I became determined that no child should have to go through a comparable experience.

My early experience working at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London doubled my determination and, together with a clinical psychologist colleague, I set about developing a solution based on the established essentials of what is needed to treat child obesity: nutrition, exercise, behaviour modification and parental involvement.

We created the MEND Programme for seven-13 year old children and their parents, a self-contained course designed for delivery in partnership with community organisations. Clinical research, which I conducted  at the University College London  Institute of Child Health, soon demonstrated that it achieved significant and sustained improvements in important health outcomes such as body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, fitness and self esteem.

Armed with the wherewithal, we determined to find a way that we could make the course available on a large enough scale to genuinely begin to make a difference to child obesity prevalence in the UK and beyond.

Joining forces with a management consultant colleague we established MEND Central on social enterprise principles to provide supporting infrastructure for the operational delivery of the programmes and galvanise funding to ensure that places on the programme could be offered free of charge to participating families.

At the end of 2006 we were lucky enough to secure a £3m three-year commitment by Sainsbury's and a £7.9m award from the Big Lottery Wellbeing Fund, providing the means to treat 28,000 children and their families for free, working in partnership with an extremely wide variety of community-based partner organisations ranging from Primary Care Trusts and Local Authorities to football clubs and even the fire service.

We have carefully up-scaled our operation on a phased basis and it's been a fairly steep learning curve, particularly since we are accountable to so many local, national and now international stakeholders.

As well as passing the milestone of 10,000 participating families, our network of MEND programmes has evolved into the largest treatment programme for overweight children in the world and we are running variants of our courses in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and the United States.

We are also looking at different ages and are collaborating with Sure Start Children's Centres on the roll-out of a Programme for parents of two-four year olds to help give them the healthiest possible start in life and a new course for five-seven year olds. Other products and services are in the pipeline including a customised version for the adult market.

Although funding for 28,000 children and families sounds like a significant figure it is in truth a drop in the ocean as there are approximately 2.5m overweight and obese children in the UK alone.

We continue to pursue for effective, sustainable funding sources to address this shortfall. And it's an issue to which I'm thoroughly committed. I have only to look at old family photo albums to remind myself why.

Paul Sacher is founder, CEO and development officer at MEND Central

www.mendcentral.org