Obesity in the Workplace: a Systematic Review of Barriers and Facilitators to Healthy Lifestyles

Workplace health promotion has become a major focus for many organizations, but for these efforts to be effective, they need to recognize that there are barriers to individuals choosing and participating in healthy nutrition and physical activity behavior. This systematic review seeks to identify, classify, and discuss several of these barriers, as well as facilitators, integrate important theories that explain their effects on behavior outcomes and provide scientific evidence for their existence and importance in employee health behavior choices. Our search identified 14 articles that sought specifically to identify barriers and/or facilitators to healthy choices in the workplace. An analysis of these barriers and facilitators determined that they could be classified into one of four categories: physical, personal, social, and organizational factors. Suggestions for best practices for utilizing this information for health promotion and future research avenues are also discussed.