Our YMCA YPHD Before and After school program, uses the CATCH Curriculum. CATCH stands for a Coordinated Approach to Child Health. By uniting multiple players in a child’s life to create a community of health, CATCH is proven to prevent childhood obesity and supported by 25 years of research and 120 academic papers indicating that a CATCH can result in an 11 per cent decrease in children being overweight and obese.

The program aims to impact messaging a child receives in physical education, the lunchroom, the classroom, and the home, to form an effective resource that impacts a child’s choices not only in school, but lifelong.

Two of the most important ways that CATCH creates behavior change are:

• by enabling children to identify healthy foods
• by increasing the amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity

The CATCH terminology for identifying healthful foods–GO, SLOW and WHOA–has been adopted even colloquially nationwide as a simple means of labeling food’s nutritional content