Table 2.

Participant-identified challenges of healthy lifestyle change

Factors	Quotation to illustrate identified challenges
Financial cost	‘Fruit and veggies, they encourage you to eat them, but I can spend $40 odd, $50 just on fruit and veggies a week out of my groceries, and then, you know, you’ve still got your meat and everything else on that it’s not cheap to live (…) there’s people worse off than me that really struggle. So you look at your food and then your health system, like, doctors and then your medicines, it all adds up.’ – mother, New Zealand European
Food environment	‘…you sit there and you’re not hungry, after about five minutes of ads about food and junk food then you think ‘oh I might go have a biscuit or a cup of tea’ – mother, Māori
Time pressures	‘I mean, when you’re in a busy life you haven’t got time to go reading everything on the box in the supermarket have you?’ – mother, New Zealand European
Stress	‘I always have to watch my weight and I am trying to be a mother and I might have to go to work as well and I’m trying to figure what everybody is going to eat every day and it’s exhausting. How do I keep everybody on track and not fall over?’ – mother, Māori
Consistency across households	‘I had to knuckle down on my partner with my daughter because he’d be like ‘I’m allowed to give her a treat’ and I’m like ‘yeah, and then she goes down to Nanny’s and Nanny has made her cupcakes and then she goes over to Koro’s and he’s done all these things, and her aunties will give her all these things’. It all adds up to lots of sugar.’ – mother, Māori
Independence in adolescence	‘So when I controlled everything, she was younger, we got her weight down (…) I could control it, but as she’s got to teenage years, we have our license now, we have a job. We can’t control it. We’re our own identity so now she’s her own, she is her own weight and I can’t do anything about it.’ – mother, New Zealand European
Concern for mental health	‘I just don’t want him to have any issues about it. We try our best to make sure he eats good stuff.’ – mother, New Zealand European (child is Māori)
Frustration when not seeing change	‘(DAUGHTER)’s always been big. She’s still a big girl now. But whatever she tries to do, nothing works. She would eat nothing, she could just drink water, and still gain weight. She’s just one of those people. The more exercise she does, it does nothing.’ – mother, New Zealand European