ASO Webinar: Physical Activity Webinars (Joint Series with EASO) - Exercise Training for People Living with Overweight or Obesity: Multiple Benefits Beyond Weight Loss

Alice Bellicha is associate professor in Nutrition and Public Health at Sorbonne Paris Nord University in the Paris area. Her research activities over the last few years have focused on the role of physical activity in the management of patients living with obesity. She took an active part in the coordination of the EASO Physical Activity Working Group that synthetized the literature and proposed recommendations on exercise training in the management of overweight and obesity in adults. In 2020, she received the EASO New Investigator Award in Clinical Research. Since Sept 2021, she is a member of the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team (EREN) and will contribute to the development of patient cohorts with the aim to better understand the role of nutritional factors (dietary intake and physical activity) in the secondary and tertiary prevention of chronic diseases.

Susie Birney is from Dublin, born in 1975.

She lives with an eating disorder called ARFID. Despite being physically active growing up, Type 2 Diabetes and other co-morbidities have been health barriers for her since her 30’s.

In 2015 Susie had a Roux-en-Y, with her diabetes in remission since. Coping with regain is a daily challenge.

Susie is a patient representative with the Association for the Studies of Obesity Ireland (ASOI)

She is Secretary of the European Coalition for People Living with Obesity (ECPO).

She also leads the newly formed national patient led organization the Irish Coalition for People Living with Obesity (ICPO)

Susie shares her experiences to help address weight stigma and help to improve the lives of those who live with obesity.

Eliana V. Carraça is an Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Educação Física e Desporto, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisboa, Portugal. She is a clinical exercise physiologist, with a master in exercise and health, and received her Ph.D. in Health and Fitness in 2012. She has also received a Best Master Student award in 2009. Her research revolves around the field of motivational, self-regulatory and behavioural predictors of physical activity, eating behaviour and weight management. She is especially interested in the interplay and cross-behavioural regulation between physical activity and eating-self regulation, especially at the mechanistic level. She explores the mediating role of motivational dynamics (based on self-determination theory) and potential interactions with other psychological and non-psychological factors that might contribute to physical activity/exercise function as a gateway behaviour for healthy eating. Additionally, she has been involved in the design of health behaviour change interventions applying self-determination theory (in overweight/obese women and recreational runners). She has published 45 international peer-reviewed articles (h-index Scopus 14; h-index Google Scholar 20; 2606 citations), 10 national articles, was a co-author of 4 international and 2 national book chapters, and has received 6 awards and/or honours. She integrated the EASO (European Association for the Study of Obesity) Physical Activity Working Group, which drafted the first EASO recommendations for physical activity in adults with overweight or obesity, in collaboration with several leading researchers in the field of Obesity. She is currently the principal investigator of PAC-WOMAN (recently funded by FCT), a national project that will test a physical activity behaviour change intervention for post-menopausal breast cancer survivors on aromatase inhibitors. She was also the co-coordinator of KoR (Keep on Running) national project, a digital (brief) intervention study designed to increase sustained adherence to recreational running in a naturalistic environment. In the past, she has participated in the SPOTLIGHT project, funded by the European Commission (FP7), and in several FCT-funded projects (the PESO Study, the "Physical Activity and the Self-Regulation of Eating Behaviour and Body Weight" project, the Open-Access Repository of Self-Regulation Measures for Exercise, Eating, and Weight Control).

MD, Associate Professor in Internal Medicine. Department of Medicine, Padova University Hospital.

Head of the Sport and Exercise Medicine Division, Director of the School of Specialization of Sport and Exercise Medicine, University Padova, contact person for Exercise is Medicine® Italy.

Graham Finlayson is an ASO trustee since 2018 and Chairs the ASO Communications, Networks and Partnerships sub-committee. He is a psychologist and Professor in Psychobiology in the Faculty of Medicine & Health, University of Leeds, UK. He also holds a Visiting Professorship at Steno Diabetes Centre Copenhagen. His research focuses on understanding what underpins the control of human appetite and why people overeat. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed research papers with +8,000 total citations.

Jean-Michel Oppert, MD, PhD, is Professor of Nutrition at Sorbonne University, Paris, France. For his clinical work, he is head of the Department of Nutrition at Pitié-Salpêtrière university hospital (AP-HP) which is focused on advanced care of patients with severe obesity.

His current research interests include the measurement of physical activity and sedentary behaviour in health and disease, the investigation of urban environmental determinants of physical activity and diet, and the study of behavioural and physiological changes associated with surgery-induced weight loss. He has been or is involved in a number of EU and national projects on these topics and is author or co-author of more than 270 papers on nutrition, physical activity and obesity.

JM Oppert is past president (2009-12) of the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO). In 2019-21, he acted as coordinator of the EASO Physical Activity Working Group which produced a series of reviews, meta-analyses and recommendations on the topic of exercise training in the management of overweight and obesity.

Audrey Roberts is from Glasgow, Scotland. In 2015 she became the Scottish Patient Representative for the EASO Patient Council. Since then, was elected to the position of Vice-President of the European Coalition for People Living with Obesity (previously EASO Patient Council) on its inception in May 2019.
She has served as a committee member and trustee of the charity WLSinfo (now Obesity UK) for the past 18 years and I have organised the support group in Glasgow for pre-and post-op bariatric patients, since 2003.
More recently she represents Obesity UK within the Global Obesity Patient Alliance (GOPA)
She manages online discussion groups and one-to-one meetings with people who have or are considering bariatric surgery, who struggle with excess weight and issues related to obesity.

Marleen van Baak is emeritus professor of Physiology of Obesity at Maastricht University, Netherlands. She started her career as an exercise physiologist and later on combined it with the role of nutrition in the regulation of body weight and other health factors in obesity.