Human behavior is very essential in maintaining a good health, consequently preventing a lot of diseases. Obesity is the number one cause of death in America today; statistics shows that lack of intervention could lead to dire consequences in future. Health practitioners have thus taken a lead role in ensuring a remedy to this scourge, in that light, different strategies have been enforced by the nursing fraternity for quite some time. Growing evidence shows that effective program for health behavior change needs a multifaceted view, an approach that will help the people change and adopt, thus maintaining a particular behavior. Strategies have been formulated by the nursing community and include different models of behavior change.
Health Belief Model is one of the earliest theories that nurses have strategized for understanding health behavior. This model is used to explain why people do not engage in practices of detecting and preventing obesity at an early stage. It combines the elements of cognitive theory and operant conditioning theory. The operant conditioning theory explains that the frequency of a particular behavior is determined by its consequences, whereas the cognitive theory emphasizes on the explanation of that behavior. An instance is the desire to avoid a heart disease, this is a value and a particular behavior can be used to prevent it. Susceptibility is the perception of risk of developing a condition; it involves an evaluation of risk rather than a derived level of risk.
This model has been very essential as it recognizes that prevention will only happen in the absence of illness, and requires people to take action in the absence of the disease. For instance, to prevent obesity, it requires an individual to have maximum exercise sessions. The only limitation of HBM is the lack of predictive value for some tenets. For instance, the perceived severity of obesity does not imply that people will start to apply proper exercise sessions.
As much as a chronic disease has a direct effect on the patient, it is a stressor for the family members. The Family theory explains that obesity as a chronic stress has important determinants; the magnitude of change required by the family and the patient, say in forms of what they eat in case of obesity, and the capacity of the patient in the family and his entire life approach. The scientific community recognizes the good influence of a family. The great emotional intensity offered by the family than most of the social setups is very essential in ensuring better health standards. Research shows that a substantive and positive association between the members of a family and management of terminal diseases is positively related. Obesity is directly interlinked by the association of members of a family, it could be the lead cause of the condition, and could also be the number one remedy. Management of such a disease requires a group of intimate beings with genuine emotional effects that is pegged on loyalty, attachment, reciprocity, solidarity and identification and definitely a future as a cohesive group. Obesity has for instance escalated in the US due to the lack of cohesive family structures. Family could be considered a setting of disease management; it should be narrow for the purposes of intervention, and broad to include the different forms taken in the society. Obesity could be greatly controlled by a cohesive unit of a therapeutic family.
References
A, B. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H.Freeman and Co.
Alyson Kettles, P. W. (2001). Therapeutic Interventions for Forensic Mental Health Nurses. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Marie Truglio-Londrigan, S. L. (2012). Public Health Nursing: Practicing Population-based Care. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
