enable children to apply healthy lifestyle information to their own lives. Children spend, on average, a quarter of their waking lives in schools; therefore, schools can be seen as an effective environment and source to help encourage healthy lifestyles. However, that leaves three quarters of a child’s time in which they are out of the control of the school environment. Strategies must be developed to unite the teaching at school with practices in the home. This supports the conclusions of Hughes, Sherman, and Whitaker (2010) who write that strategies need to be framed in a manner that makes low income mothers feel more supported in addressing issues their children may have with their weight. Ensuring that ap- proaches to encourage healthy lives take on a holistic format will also help to provide consistent and realistic role models. There needs to be a concerted effort from within society to develop role models who have a healthy relationship with food and exercise. These seem to already exist for young boys in the form of sporting heroes but seem in short supply for young girls who already consider that being healthy is the ideal but then look to surgery as a form of weight loss. Lieberman, Gauvin, Bukowski, and White (2001) highlight the impor- tance of role models and peer influence in the onset of disordered eating in young girls and this needs to be seriously taken into account when sending out messages that being overweight is bad, girls need to be aware that being underweight also has severe health consequences. In conclusion, the time children spend eating and taking part in physical activity out of school is likely to be the biggest challenge to preventing the continuing obesity problems in the United King- dom, and this is where current strategies appear to be failing. Children understand obesity and its contributing factors in terms set out to them by those people they consider role models. 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International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, 19, 423 430. Citation: Int J Qualitative Stud Health Well-being 2011; 6: 7170 - DOI: 10.3402/qhw.v6i3.7170 13 (page number not for citation purpose)