Pediatrician Theresa Wee creates a new way to cheer her patients to better health.  

By Eric Shearer

Theresa Wee’s parents taught her the importance of being healthy and she grew up loving sports, especially tennis. At age 6, she was winning science fairs and devouring biographies of Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, and her parents encouraged her ambition to become a doctor.

Now she’s a pediatrician, and she recently developed unique group sessions to make her patients passionate about being healthy, just like when she was growing up.

“I always felt like I could reach more people in a group setting,” says Wee. “I was working one on one and it was frustrating because you say the same thing over and over.” She attended a lecture on the effectiveness of group sessions in treating asthma, and was inspired by the Weight Watchers model of group meetings.

In time, Wee hit on the right format. “I decided, ‘I’m going to do a health and wellness workshop,’ because we need to have families, and especially the young children, educated in what’s right to eat and be healthy. If we could do that, we wouldn’t have chronic illnesses in adulthood.”

Last January, she hosted her first workshop for obese patients, acting as their cheerleader for getting healthy and a coach for the parents and families. Eight families were invited to four Saturday sessions to learn easy-to-remember messages about eating fruits and vegetables, portion control, the importance of being active, and staying on track.

The attendees were cautious at first, but Wee was prepared for that. “If I’m going to spend my Saturday afternoon at work, I’m going to make this fun,” was her approach. “We’re just going to get real crazy, get everyone involved in cheering … I even had the cheerleaders from Mililani High School come. ‘We love veggies, yes, we do! We love veggies, how about you?!’ People kind of looked like, ‘This is really nuts.’” Wee’s enthusiasm eased inhibitions and “by the end of the first session, people were smiling and saying, ‘Oh, we learned a lot,’ and looking forward to coming back,” Wee says.

Because altering habits can be difficult, Wee encouraged the group to share their problems and opened up about her own struggles to give up ice cream and soda. Her goal was to get her obese patients to realize that “it’s not only them – we all have to work on it. And let’s work on it together. And parents and caretakers felt like they were not alone.”

As the sessions went on, the participants spoke up about their own problems. Fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive and many did not know how to cook them. Group discussion led to solutions.

“We talked about how frozen fruits and veggies, if you go to Costco, can be inexpensive,” says Wee. “We talked about frozen peas and carrots, frozen corn, frozen strawberries, and how to prepare dishes with these things. In fact, we’re still in the process of collecting recipes, easy fruit and veggie dishes that you can prepare.” In talking through these difficulties, the group bonded, socialized, and maintained friendships.

The results have been satisfying. “Almost every single patient has maintained their body mass index or even gone down,” says Wee. “The funny, unexpected success of this program is the parents, especially the mothers – there are three mothers who have lost 20 to 30 pounds. They weren’t expecting to lose weight. However, I think because they have to be the ones in charge of buying and preparing the food and getting the kids to exercise, they’re losing weight, too.”

Wee has already scheduled more workshops and is partnering with the U.S. Army and Jamba Juice to communicate the importance of being active and eating healthy. In the future, she hopes to add parenting skills workshops. She knows firsthand how parents can shape their kids’ well-being for life.