Table 3.

Select Quotes of General Health Beliefs, Barriers to Healthy Eating and Physical Activity, and Motivators for Weight Management From Interviews With Hispanic Men 18 to 64 Years of Age.

General health beliefs

● I was diagnosed with diabetes and I see a lot of older gentlemen like myself and older than me that for years they just don’t take care of themselves and you know [I have been] reading up on it and learning that it’s just a silent killer.

● Just from my own family . . . there have been a lot of cancers. . . . I know people with diabetes and it’s hard. It’s a little harder to control because their lifestyle gets hindered and they just have to follow this diabetic schedule forever. Some people don’t adhere to it and they end up dying because of it. So that’s kind of the way I feel about diabetes plus, it’s in my family so it’s everywhere.

Barriers to healthy eating

Access to affordable foods

● I can’t always afford to have the healthiest things in my fridge. I can’t always afford to have the healthiest dry snacks available to me. If you want to eat healthy you can buy groceries that are going to last you all month but they’re not going to be healthy. So like if sometimes money is tight I’m like okay whatever is cheapest that’s what I’m going to eat today.

● Dietary norms and familial influence

● Traditional food is full of fat and lots of calories and they also tend to have big portions too. . . . My grandmother cooks with that blue lard . . . you know beans, rice, bacon, and lard, it all adds up. . . . That prevents me to eat the way that I want . . . I’m hungry and there’s good food and you don’t want to separate yourself from your family by telling them you don’t want to eat what they’re eating and eat your own thing. You distance yourself from that kind of bond when you don’t eat with your family.

Convenience

● To cook a healthier meal you got to like, if you got frozen chicken you got to thaw it out you gotta like season it and cook it so that’s like 20 minutes, 30 minutes right there. Where if you just get a hot dog you just throw it in the microwave for a minute put it in a bun with ketchup and it’s done. So guys don’t want to spend a lot of time cooking so they just make what’s easy and cheap. Me personally, it’s just I don’t like wasting time cooking I think of other things to do that are more important to me.

Barriers to physical activity

Access to safe spaces

● It seems like there’s a lot of gangs and stuff around here. So, usually I’m not out walking around in public especially late at night if I was to get off work and have to exercise, I wouldn’t walk around down here. . . . People don’t feel safe cause they got bars all over their windows and doors.

Strenuous labor, long hours, and fatigue

● Typical Mexican males are the workers. They are the blue collar type workers doing the manual labor and the tough jobs. . . . At the end of the day your typical Mexican male is tired from a full day’s work.

● I just think that Hispanics are more tired, they do more throughout the day . . . I just think that they work more and they don’t make it as important to work out as other males do.

Motivators for weight management

Knowledge of the risks and the hard truth

● She just scared me straight and told me the truth. She wasn’t sugar coating or anything. She just telling me the truth that my cholesterol was so high that if I didn’t take care of it, I’d probably die soon. So, I don’t want that. . . . Till I got my advice and information from the doctor [I would] eat what I want to eat when I’m hungry. But now I’m think more like . . . I haven’t eaten any vegetables maybe I should eat an apple or a banana.

● Just knowing the health risks, since I’m not exercising what’s going to happen to me. . . . If it affects me more I feel like it would scare me into doing it. Cause I know like if was scared into exercising I’d be more like well okay you know if you don’t exercise now, X, Y, and Z can happen to you so do it or else you know, potentially you could die.

The role of a Hispanic man and his family

● It’s our job to take care of people we have to provide we have to be there for them and for me to know that my life might be cut short because I don’t want to do the necessary things to change then I’m kind of letting people down.

Reaching a turning point

● I think it is a personal thing you know? Everyone has to reach that point at their own time when they finally realize it you know? Like when I went to the doctor and I was having problems with my knees hurting, my back hurting and then they checked my cholesterol and I was really high and I was like prediabetic like I was almost right there having diabetes. And then she started telling me all this stuff that would happen if I just let it go. And it scared [me] so I started to change.