Slimming World – The Journey So Far

Written by: Lauren Perkin, Programme Officer

The You’ve Got This team have been working in partnership with Slimming World since the outset of the initial bid to Sport England. Throughout this time our relationship has grown, and our understanding of our joint work has expanded.

The initial ideas behind this workstream were looking at increasing the presence of physical activity in the South Tees Slimming World groups. Throughout the last 3 years we have worked with Slimming World to think and work differently to gain a deeper understanding of the issues faced when working with a private company.

With the pandemic disrupting the relationship with the local leads due to them being stretched in supporting all local consultants, and local consultants and members being unsettled and stretched themselves, we placed the work on pause until groups had restarted face to face post lockdown.

Since moving out of lockdown we established that we need to expand our relationships to develop a broader depth of insight and connection to the national Slimming World agenda and decisions, as well as the working cultures of the current Slimming World consultants. We already had a vast array of insight from the perspective of a member but identified an opportunity to build on this and strengthen our approach.

Through discussions we established that nationally Slimming World have re-invigorated all their consultants with a new layered learning approach and are working to ensure that discussion around physical activity takes place within every session. This provided us with more opportunity to explore the potential barriers the consultants faced.

Towards the end of 2021 we co-hosted an interactive discussion with all of the consultants in the South Tees area and through this session we established the key areas that they or their members struggled with in relation to keeping active. In addition to that we wanted to know the ideas they had previously tested and any potential opportunities they saw for us to make the physical activity more embedded into their way of working.

This and the original insight we have has given us a very clear picture of the issues and support required moving forward. The insight has directly influenced ways of working for Slimming World and enabled them to develop training and have effective conversations with their consultants that get to the heart of the barriers in embedding physical activity into their current approach. We have then come together and co-created and established some key areas of focus for the partnership to address collectively:

• The need for real, local and relatable stories of people at varying points of their slimming and active journey.

• Additional capacity within each group to support members with their barriers and also initiate and embed physical activity at each session.

• Capturing transferable and relatable insight and learning to national colleagues.

As a partnership we have already started to create plans running to April 2021 where we will pilot embedding local champions called Magic Movers into each Slimming World group in South Tees to support local people around activity and to start to capture some real stories of local people being active to use for a campaign.

You can chat to one of the Core Team for more information on our ‘Magic Movers’ and Slimming World work.