NCT04021745

Bringing Awareness Into Eating

Mindful Eating - Bringing Awareness Into Eating

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 65 (actual)
• Sponsor: Brown University · Academic / Other
• Sex: Female
• Age: 18 Years – 70 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to test an app-based mindful eating intervention to decrease the reward value of unhealthy food.

Detailed description

Eating healthily is highly beneficial. However, changing eating habits is notoriously difficult. Individuals often believe that they simply need to "restrain" their eating impulses in order to eat more healthily. However, such an approach has not only been shown to be quite ineffective over long time spans, it is also associated with aversive feelings: It simply does not feel good to struggle with one's own impulses. Investigators are testing a new approach to overcoming unhealthy eating habits, which utilizes mindful eating to change the reward value of unhealthy food. The hypothesis is that if people pay attention to how unhealthy food (e.g. "junk" food) makes them feel in their bodies, their liking it and desire to eat it will decrease naturally. Participants might become aware, for example, that eating a whole bag of chips leads to nausea, while eating a salad makes them feel fresh and energetic. Investigators will assess whether and how the anticipated and actual satisfaction associated with unhealthy food will decrease the more often participants use this intervention.

Conditions

• Stress Eating
• Reward-based Eating
• Craving-related Eating

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	App-based mindful eating	This is a mindful eating smartphone application comprised of twenty-eight modules of 10-15 minutes each designed to teach mindfulness for binge eating. The feature that is being tested will ask individuals to do a mental exercise when they're craving and will measure their satisfaction related to the experience.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-07-15
• Primary completion: 2019-10-28
• Completion: 2019-10-28
• First posted: 2019-07-16
• Last updated: 2020-01-13

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States