Mindfulness App for Reducing Food Cravings

NCT05347914 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 49

Last updated 2023-10-18

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

More than half of Canadian are overweight or obese and over fifty percent of individuals who are obese are emotional eaters. Emotional eating is defined as the tendency to eat in response to negative emotions and can be understood as reward-based eating behavior that is reinforced by modern obesogenic environments. Over time, food-related cues can interfere with reward-based learning processes such that an individual develops a conditioned response to eat for reasons that are not associated with physiological hunger. Mindfulness has the potential to act on the reward-base habit loop of emotional eating. One potential target is cravings or the urges to eat. This can be targeted using the mindfulness exercise called "RAIN" which calls for individuals to (1) Recognize and name their craving, to (2) Acknowledge its presence and to give it space to "be"; (3) then Investigate and bring an attitude of curiosity to their experience - Where did these feelings comes from? Have I felt this way before? then (4) Not-identify with your experience- that is, remind yourself that although your craving or urge to eat is very powerful, it only makes up a small part of who you are. The aim of the study is to therefore test a pilot intervention that implements a targeted mindfulness-based exercise (RAIN), using a mobile app, to attenuate the relationship between feeling a negative internal state (affect) and eating.

Conditions

  • Emotional Eating

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Mindfulness

Participants will be taught a mindfulness exercise and will be instructed to use this exercise (following a mobile app) whenever they experience a food craving to eat for non-homeostatic reasons.

Sponsors & Collaborators

Study Design

Allocation
NA
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Model
SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2022-06-01
Primary Completion
2023-08-28
Completion
2023-08-28

Countries

  • Canada

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05347914 on ClinicalTrials.gov