Promoting the maintenance of health behavior change: recommendations for the next generation of research and practice.

This article highlights several broad themes that emerged from the series of papers presented at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute conference, "Maintenance of Behavior Change in Cardiorespiratory Risk Reduction," with a view to generating recommendations for the next generation of research and practice. Major recommendations center around the need for (a) new models of population health behavior change and maintenance that integrate individual-level with broader environmental and macro-level policy influences; (b) a fuller model of the maintenance process, which views maintenance more as a journey than as a destination; and (c) more theory-based and interdisciplinary research on the maintenance process and on strategies for assisting special populations and addressing more than one behavioral risk at a time.