Mindfulness App for Reducing Food Cravings

McGill University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Emotional Eating

Treatments: Behavioral: Mindfulness

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05347914

McGillU mindfulness app

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Enrollment: 49 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

1. Adults (age > 18 years) who meet criteria for emotional eating
2. Demonstrate a lack of control over eating
3. High levels of preoccupation with food

Exclusion criteria

1. Having been pregnant in the past six months or planning on becoming pregnant in the next year
2. currently undergoing treatment for cancer
3. using medication that affects body weight or appetite
4. being diagnosed with Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, currently active Major Depression, or other psychiatric illnesses that may affect appetite.
5. Participants must also be proficient in English
6. Own a smartphone

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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49 participants in 1 patient group

Mindfulness

Experimental group

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness