Health problems associated with obesity are a major healthcare challenge. Effective interventions and successful commercial weight loss programmes to help people lose weight already exist. However, most people re-gain the weight they lose – weight loss maintenance is really difficult.

Researchers already knew that weight loss maintenance (WLM) depends on changing behaviours. There are many techniques available to help people change their behaviour in the long term but we still don’t know which of these techniques work best for WLM or why. We also don’t know how different social and healthcare contexts influence the effectiveness of different techniques. To better tackle obesity and being overweight, we need to learn more about how different people change their behaviour to maintain their weight loss - this was the main research aim of NoHoW.

During the project, we learned about behaviour change to develop tools to help people maintain their weight loss, and looked at how technology can be put to work to help people make lasting changes. We assembled a Toolkit for WLM - the NoHoW Toolkit - that we tested with the help of participants in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Denmark.