BeeZee Blog

BeeZeeFest is the celebration none of us got to have in the past 18 months. Missed Glastonbury? No problem, we have got you covered. The theme is ‘festival’ because we value being together and experiencing great things together. In reality, it is a way to switch off from the immediacy of the everyday grind and get some new perspective on our important work.

A programme that is a proven success with young children or adults won’t necessarily work for teenagers. It’s not that they speak a different language… (most of the time!)… but it’s important to get the delivery right in order to involve, challenge and support them.

I have written in the past about my own mental health experiences, which you can see here but I wanted to write something brief to share my experiences of mental health during the pandemic.

Charan, Nutritionist and Proud Hufflepuff, in our Hertfordshire team has been delving into our BeeZee Families programme data, going all the way back to 2013, to determine what factors impact programme retention and what more we can do to help prevent families dropping-off a course.

Much of the debate around some of the biggest determinants of quality of life relates to life choices, and yet most of the conversation about weight, for example, puts the onus on the individual to make better choices.

Data is vitally important in our work at BeeZee Bodies, and we're fortunate to have data hound and proud Hufflepuff, Charan Gill leading the charge to better understand what is working and how we can amplify the positive outcomes. 

At BeeZee Bodies, most of the people we work with take stock of their immediate environment (physical, social, etc.) and identify the changes they need to make in order to set up new defaults that push them towards their new goals, rather than using willpower to force them through.

Have you ever noticed that your ability to resist temptations is strongest in the morning but gets more difficult throughout the day? Studies have shown that as we use willpower on certain tasks or situations, we are less able to resist temptations later in the day.

Marketers of products well understand how to present choices to consumers to influence their choices. This is evident in the position of items in supermarket, the day and time you’re served digital fast food ads, even the ease of purchase of fast food through one-click apps, to name just a few we’re faced with every day. But how can we take back control of our environments, and our choices?

Here I attempt to give a brief overview of some of the significant events that are responsible for our biological and social evolution, designed to highlight that we are the way we are - and therefore we eat the way we eat - for a reason.

If you’re trying to make a change in your behaviour - to eat more healthily, to cut down on snacking, to exercise regularly – your experience is unlikely to be linear. Understanding this helps us to embrace the bumps in the process, and to use the “failures” to our advantage.

In this blog, Stu King talks about the parallels between getting healthier and losing weight, and saving money for the future. He also offers tips and practical tools to help you stick to your goals in 2021.

In this blog Stu King describes why it's human nature to look to key moments in time in which to make landmark shifts in our behaviour. Whilst this can be motivating, it can also lead to the "What the Hell" effect throwing your progress off course until the next key moment occurs, which could be 1 month, 1 year or 10 years in the future.

Being aware of your conflict style can often lead to a more positive outcome for everyone.   

The news and social media this week is filled with Tory shaming, as Boris refuses to U-turn on the decision not to extend free school meals during half term.  

I love finding people and work that inspire me to keep pushing forward. Gina Merchant is absolutely one of those people; a Behavioural Scientist specialising in digital health product development.

With the final sessions of the first ever BeeZee LIVE programme completed in July, we’ve spent the last couple of months consulting, reflecting and applying learnings.

Amidst the growing evidence of the link between obesity and an increased risk of coronavirus, a recent report warns that 20 years of targets and policies directed towards the aim to half childhood obesity by 2030, will fall drastically short.  

We’ve created an awesome asset bank of content around eating well and adopting healthy habits during #lockdown. It’s free for any local authority public health team to use.

When I was reading Something Bad Happened, little did I know that just around the corner, the contents would be more useful than ever for trusted adults to sensitively navigate big events with children.

It is important not to let this discontinuity disrupt good habits. You need to pivot contexts. Take stock of the confines you find yourself in now and think about how to make your old habits work in this new context.

How our maternity programme moved from information and behavioural techniques to a resilience building group.

Charan, Nutritionist and Proud Hufflepuff, in our Hertfordshire team was granted a fellowship with CLAHRC. She recently got to present her findings at the East of England Fellows Showcase!

If you want to think differently about the problems you have to solve in your work life, or any other issues for that matter, embrace diversity.

At this time of year it's tempting to go for a quick diet fix. If you want some real advice on what not to do, read on. 

I have a huge passion for Men’s Health. Movember means something more to me than the Moustache challenge.

Make physical activity a part of your identity... and you can stop trying to be active, and just be active! 

Here at BeeZee Bodies we really value the wellbeing of everyone we work with. On 10th October 2019, also World Mental Health Day, the Government published ‘State of the nation 2019: children and young people’s wellbeing’. We were pleased to see that one of the main findings was that the majority of (four out of five) children and young people are happy with their lives.

The latest Health Matters blog; ‘Addressing the food environment as part of a local whole systems approach to obesity’ raises several important points about how we will reverse the rising trend of obesity in children, young people and adults in this country.

Using a ‘text-only’ procurement system - This is a prime opportunity to learn something about the potential providers that needn’t be missed by having a solely text-based system.

When putting out a very specific tender, it is likely that providers say very similar things in order to conform to the service specification. So, it is in the nuance, that you are likely to find reasons to commission or not commission a provider. Do the tools currently allow for this?

Given the complexity of behaviour change in the context of the real, lived-experience, it is difficult to find KPI’s that can be collected easily that demonstrate the kind of change that is likely to elicit sustainable outcomes.

You will be wedded to this service for the foreseeable future, so it is important to get the scoring right so that the service that demonstrates the traits you are genuinely looking for wins the tender.

Failure should be a great opportunity to learn. The most progressive organisations are celebrating things that don't work because they are the greatest opportunity for improvement. But they have to exist in a culture that embraces it and doesn't penalise people for having the guts to raise important issues.

There is something you can do as a commissioner to satisfy yourself that the providers can deliver what they say they will. Get references.

The most effective system of ensuring that key learning is not lost that I have encountered is from a colleague who kept a running diary – which I am calling a ‘playbook’ – throughout the procurement process they ran.