NCT05347914

Mindfulness App for Reducing Food Cravings

Completed NA Last updated 18 October 2023

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Mindfulness in Emotional Eating in 49 participants. Completed in 28 August 2023.

Timeline

1 June 2022

Primary endpoint
28 August 2023

28 August 2023

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	McGill University
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	na
Design	single group
Masking	none
Primary purpose	treatment
Enrollment	49
Start date	1 June 2022
Primary completion	28 August 2023
Estimated completion	28 August 2023
Sites	2 locations across Canada

Drugs / interventions tested

• Mindfulness

Conditions studied

• Emotional Eating — all drugs for Emotional Eating →

Sponsor

McGill University

Who can join

18 and older, any sex, with Emotional Eating. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

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.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.