Next Level Health: a holistic health and wellbeing program to empower New Zealand women

Summary Improving equity in women’s health requires gender-specific and empowering approaches. However, health programs often disempower women by adopting a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that emphasizes diet, exercise and weight loss over other important aspects like sleep and mental wellbeing. This article reports on the design of Next Level Health (NLH), a program that aims to empower women through developing a wide range of health behaviors to support their holistic wellbeing. NLH is grounded by ethics, theory and evidence to support women to make achievable, sustainable changes that are relevant to their everyday lives. Women utilized the NLH framework to develop an integrative health routine across six domains: physical activity, sleep, nutrition, eating behavior, self-care and stress management. The framework guided them to set small, incremental goals that were adaptive to their needs and built from their existing circumstances. Participants reflected on their progress with a facilitator during monthly meetings, accessed a social media support page and received monthly text messages. Health programs remain an essential approach to improving women’s health alongside community- and policy-level strategies. The development of NLH exemplifies how evidence may partner with modern health promotion values to inform relevant and ethical program design for women. Lay Summary In western societies, health programs often focus on weight loss through exercise and diet to promote women’s health. Such approaches disempower women by undervaluing important factors affecting their health like stress and sleep and narrow their scope for ‘health success’. This article reports on the development of Next Level Health (NLH) that aims to help women gain greater health-related control by broadening their approach to health. The program is designed to support women to set small, achievable goals across six domains (physical activity, sleep, nutrition, eating behavior, self-care, and stress management) toward developing positive and sustainable health behaviors. Although women work with a facilitator each month to set goals, they are ultimately in control of formulating their health plans and their progression through NLH. Women can support each other by joining a community of other NLH participants through a social media group. NLH offers a novel program that is responsive to women’s individual health needs and broadens their potential for health success.