NCT06127251

Active You: Walk, Dance, and Tone Your Abs to Reduce Your Risk of Diabetes

A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial of Walking, Dance, and Abdominal Core Workouts to Improve Adipocytokines Among Insufficiently Active Adults With Obesity

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 54 (actual)
• Sponsor: Emory University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The phenomenon of physical activity (PA) avoidance in obesity has been detailed in the literature, but there is a lack of programs designed to address the root causes. In addition to common PA barriers such as lack of time, individuals with obesity face weight-related impediments, including stigma, shame, poor fitness, and low exercise self-efficacy, which reduce their engagement in PA. These impediments have been observed in white and minoritized populations. Numerous studies have suggested that individuals with obesity prefer activities that are enjoyable, less exhausting, and conveniently available in settings where they are not exposed to stigma. The studies also point to a need for programs that focus on the general health benefits of PA rather than weight loss, which although desirable, can be elusive. Unmet weight loss expectations contribute to high dropout rates and non-adherence to the prescribed PA regimen among those with obesity. This is particularly consequential for minoritized populations including African Americans who tend to lose less weight in lifestyle interventions but achieve significant improvements in many cardiometabolic outcomes. In this proposal, investigators present PA as a buffer against the deleterious effects of obesity, agnostic of weight loss status. The Physical Activity for The Heart (PATH) program was intentionally designed to provide vicarious experiences for diverse individuals with obesity, by featuring their peers in body size, fitness level, and age engaging in PA. The impact of the PATH intervention on these biomarkers will provide important insights into the mechanisms via which a combination of popular PA modalities improves cardiometabolic outcomes in the context of obesity.

Detailed description

The proposed research is significant because it will provide key evidence supporting the use of curated, openly sourced content to address PA barriers in obesity. Physical Activity for The Heart (PATH) intervention, which is anchored on the social cognitive theory's (SCT) premise that observing similar (i.e. body type, fitness level, age) others succeed can motivate action and help demonstrate a plan for success. Thus proposal will examine the feasibility of using PATH in a weight-neutral context and the preliminary effects on adipocytokines that influence insulin resistance. If PATH improves PA and adipocytokines, it could provide a highly scalable tool for mitigating the risk of cardiometabolic disease, especially among those looking for weight-agnostic PA programs. The walking, dance, and abdominal core workouts to be examined in this proposal are extremely popular and abundant on YouTube, which makes it easy to access and curate content that can be tailored to individual preferences. The highly scalable PATH program is accessible at any time in any setting and can lessen the impact of unpredictable barriers to PA such as inclement weather or pandemics.

Conditions

• Obesity

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	PATH Intervention	The PATH intervention guides participants in making changes in their lifestyle and PA habits to support gradual improvement of PA. The health coach provides participants with access to the PATH website and instructions on how to use the resources included in PATH. The health coach meets remotely with each participant twice per month to develop a tailored plan geared towards increasing MVPA. After assigning the PATH level, the health coach guides each participant in selecting their weekly PA goal and helps them start slowly with a plan to establish regular exercise frequencies of 3-5 days per week. Participants will use a combination of walking, dance, and abdominal core workouts to add at least 10 minutes of MVPA to their baseline PA every two weeks. The remote coach will encourage each participant to engage in at least 2 days of aerobic training (walking or dance sessions), and one day of abdominal core workouts.
BEHAVIORAL	Control Group	Study staff will have a Zoom meeting with each control group participant where they will be advised to use the Be Active Your Way handout and to self-monitor PA using ScanWatch. Additionally, the group will be introduced to www.health.com, a jargon-free website that focuses on general health topics (e.g., dry eye) and the latest medical news (e.g., vaccines). Every 2 weeks control participants will meet on Zoom with study staff to review their progress in the study so as to keep the contact between the groups as similar as possible.
DEVICE	Physical activity tracker	Participants will be asked to wear a ScanWatch tracker on their non-dominant hand for the entire duration of the study using a 24-hour wear protocol.
BEHAVIORAL	Dietary education	The research team will examine diet quality and provide all study participants with educational content curated to promote diet quality. To minimize participants' burden, both the intervention and control arms will receive an email with a brief PDF addressing new diet components every 4 weeks

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-04-11
• Primary completion: 2025-05-18
• Completion: 2025-05-18
• First posted: 2023-11-13
• Last updated: 2025-06-19

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States