A leading expert on childhood obesity says creating an environment where people inherently value and demand healthier living is the biggest hurdle to shedding our high number of overweight and obese children.
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Terry Huang, who is Professor of Health at the City University of New York and the University of Nebraska Medical Centre, has also praised the ACT's efforts tackling childhood obesity in schools.
Professor Huang is visiting the nation's capital to share his experiences and highlight the the need for preventative measures to reduce the number of overweight or obese children in first world countries around the world.
He said obesity was a complex problem that required more sophisticated thinking around prevention, including shaping communities to genuinely value a healthier lifestyle, without coming across as "nagging".
"This is the biggest hurdle in public health: people can turn off because we're seen as nagging and telling them what they should be doing as opposed to connecting with them at an emotional level," he said.
"That's where the social marketing effort needs to go - to become an emotional part of people's existence.
"If we can achieve that, and we can, then we can prime people over time, gradually building up that demand for preventative efforts."
Professor Huang said many of the ACT government's two-year-old Healthy Weight Initiative measures were a "really good starting point", particularly within the school yard.
"There's a lot of interesting work happening in schools here in Canberra, such as engaging youth and putting them in the driver's seat to come up with their own solutions tailored to their own needs, which I think is a fabulous way of activating people to address a problem that affects them; its very innovative," he said.
"Also, there's an effort to make sure school cafeterias are served as an extension of the learning space - it's not just a place where learning stops and people start to eat. Through that space you can learn about health, you can learn about the culture of health, whether its labelling or serving healthier foods or even using choice architecture to nudge young people to select the healthier choices."
Mr Huang said the western world's tendency to over-consume food was the biggest driver of obesity, not only among children but more broadly.
"It's very easy to intake a lot of calories and it's quite hard to actually expend those calories," he said.
"At the same time, it's really easy to access calories everywhere.
"The challenge for us is how do we shift the environment to one that favours the opposite trend: that favours the intake of fewer calories to begin with...where the balance in the products available to us leans more towards the healthier stuff."
Mr Huang said it was also important to make environments more conducive to physical exercise as part of day-to-day life.
Other measures included making people more "resilient" to fast food and other marketing messages, and providing more sustainable services to people who are already overweight or obese.
Chief Health Officer Paul Kelly said the government was asking for "very small changes" in diet and physical activity everyday and agreed boosting public engagement was the next big challenge.
"Walking up the stairs everyday rather than taking the lift, for example - that's the sort of level we're talking about," he said.
"When we talk about resilience and we talk about what the discourse is more broadly in the population, it's the 'Biggest Loser' idea - that we have to make amazing, rapid, huge changes. You can do that for a week, a month, maybe even six months but mostly it's not sustainable."
Similarly, Dr Kelly said the ACT's healthy weight initiative was a "long-term game".
"I'm not expecting to have dramatic falls in obesity in children in two years or even five years," he said.
"We hope we'll get some stabilisation in the next Chief Health Officer's Report which will be released next year.
"Having some outside eyes like Terry's coming in and [talking] about the innovative aspect, the good progress being made, it's a great, uplifting thing for staff across government to say, 'yeah, we're actually doing good stuff here'.
"I think we've got a long way to go but we're on that path."
