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Despite multidisciplinary efforts to control the nation's obesity epidemic, obesity has persisted as one of the U.S.'s top public health problems, particularly among African Americans. Innovative approaches to address obesity that are sensitive to the unique issues of African Americans are needed. Thus, a faith-based weight-loss intervention using a community-based participatory research approach was developed, implemented, and evaluated with a rural African American faith community. A two-group, quasi-experimental, delayed intervention design was used, with church as the unit of assignment (treatment n=2, control n=2) and individual as the unit of observation (treatment n=36, control n=37). Weekly small groups led by trained community members met for 8 weeks and emphasized healthy nutrition, physical activity, and faith's connection with health. The mean weight loss of the treatment group was 3.60+/-0.64 lbs. compared to the 0.59+/-0.59-lb loss of the control group.

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One of the 1990 Health Objectives established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is for 60 per cent of adults 18-65 years of age to be participating regularly in vigorous physical exercise. Unfortunately, no valid and practical measurement system is available that will allow assessment of leisure time physical activity participation of large populations. Consequently, not only is it difficult to assess progress toward the 1990 goal, an accurate baseline from which to measure potential progress does not exist. This paper presents a time diary technique for measuring aggregate population physical activity participation and utilizes actual time diaries collected from adults by the Institute for Social Research in 1981 to arrive at a possible baseline. The results indicated that time diaries are a viable method for assessing aggregate physical activity behavior of large populations. American Adults were quite sedentary in 1981. Over a period of one week, 31% undertook no leisure time physical activity. Only 14 per cent expended more than 1600 kcals/week in leisure time physical activity, and 10 per cent met the DHHS physical activity requirements.