A group of local residents recently showed that walking the path to healthier living can be a family activity.

The latest six-week session of Suffolk Parks and Recreation’s Get Up and Get Out Program at the East Suffolk Recreation Center came to a close on Thursday. It had 12 participants this time around, including Jewel Worrell and her three children and Andre and LaTanya Jones, husband and wife.

This kind of participation is exactly what was intended by the program.

Michael Frickanisce, who is a fitness specialist for the City of Suffolk and the program coordinator, explained that the goal of Get Up and Get Out is to prevent childhood obesity by teaching families healthy eating and helping them maintain an active lifestyle.

“We’re trying to give them as many tools as we possibly can to help them make these healthy choices,” he said.

The program is set up for children, ages 6-17, plus their families, and it is funded by a grant through the Obici Healthcare Foundation.

For six Mondays, Frickanisce said program participants met with a registered dietitian where they learned how to make healthy food choices, healthy meals and how to set up their diet throughout the week.

He said the program is open to anyone in Suffolk, but the goal was to target areas of the city where barriers might exist to residents accessing information about healthy living.

For some participants, though, the dietary advice was simply good reinforcement to the children of what Mom had always said.

“It kind of taught them the same things that I’ve been telling them from the start on how to eat healthier, that everything needs to be taken in in moderation,” Jewel Worrell said.

Her son, 16-year-old Kela Worrell, said he “didn’t really eat breakfast back in the day,” but changed his ways going through the program.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, program fitness assistant Shareese Grant put participants through an hour of physical activity. She said she enjoyed seeing how motivated some of them were every week, particularly the parents who pushed the children.

“It was like a big family effort for them to push each other and get that workout,” Grant said.

She had them do circuit training, which involved five different stations, each requiring a different kind of physical activity. Each station lasted for a minute and then participants would switch immediately. They would get two-minute breaks in between three five-minute sets.

“When we first started doing circuits, we did about 40 seconds in the circuit, and then they built up to where they could do a minute,” Grant said.

Jewel Worrell said the exercise was the most important feature of the program to her because “it kind of pushed me a little harder to actually start trying to want to do more and not just sit around.”

And Grant said the participants have shown signs they will continue the healthy behaviors they have learned from the program.