Mindfulness App for Reducing Food Cravings

Emotional Eating Clinical Trial

Official title: Mobile Mindfulness Intervention to Reduce Non-Homeostatic Food Cravings in Emotional Eaters: Research Pilot

Status Completed

Clinical Trial 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.

Clinical Trial Description

n/a

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Emotional Eating

• NCT number: NCT05347914
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: McGill University
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: June 1, 2022
• Completion date: August 28, 2023