A Healthy Weight Initiative for Special Olympics Athletes

Thirty eight percent of Special Olympics (SO) athletes are obese. The rate is likely higher in people with intellectual disability who are not SO athletes. Unique obesity risk factors among people with intellectual disability include severity and type of disability, medications, living arrangements, lack of control over diet or physical activity and limited health literacy. To address these risk factors, SO created a Healthy Weight Initiative that improves upon existing sports training and health promotion activities. Individuals are encouraged to adopt healthy behaviours around diet and physical activity, with the ultimate goals being sustained healthy weight and life-long fitness for SO athletes. This initiative focuses on individual and societal environmental factors as targets for interventions, and aims to improve good nutrition and physical activity knowledge, self efficacy and practice and create healthy living and training environments. Education is delivered to athletes, families, caregivers, and coaches through a variety of health and sports channels. Interventions include targeted community-based funding to SO Programs, coach education about athlete nutrition and exercising at home, healthy meal guidelines for competition events, and a family education curriculum on healthy weight management. TRAIN provides athletes, their friends, families, teachers and coaches with easy-to-understand guidelines for achieving proper exercise and good nutrition inside and outside the SO setting. Two hundred twenty athletes have participated in five TRAIN pilots to date, with another pre-post pilot planned for Team USA athletes traveling to the SO World Summer Games in Greece. Findings from these pilots will be presented.