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Mindful Eating Training Can Help Reduce Impulsive Eating Habits

Do you find yourself eating even when you are not hungry? Do you have trouble resisting impulsive eating throughout the day? Overweight and obese individuals tend to be more impulsive and sensitive to food rewards compared to normal weight individuals. Obesity is a growing health concern, with over 2/3 of the U.S. population being overweight or obese (CDC, 2015). A recent study published in the journal Health Psychology investigated the effects of a mindful-eating training on impulsive food choice in both adolescents and adults. Mindful eating is an approach to eating where you learn to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings and sensations both during and after eating.

In this study, 348 adults and adolescents participated in two study sessions. The first session was to measure the baseline discounting rate. The baseline rate was compared to the discounting rate after the intervention in order to determine the amount of change. During the first session, participants completed a delayed discounting task, a task that measures impulsivity by comparing the preference for smaller, more immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards. For the second session, participants were randomized to a mindful eating group, DVD control, or a standard control group. The mindful-eating group completed a 50-min workshop on mindful eating where they applied their newly learned skills while eating four types of foods. The DVD control group watched a 50-min DVD about nutrition and the food pyramid. The standard control group did not participate in any training or standardized activity.

Both adolescents and adults who participated in the mindful-eating session experienced reduced impulsivity towards food choices from the baseline session. In addition, consistent with prior research individuals, both adolescents and adults, with higher percent body fat had higher food impulsivity than healthy weight individuals.

Strengths of this study include the randomized control design. This means that there was a control group and an intervention group. Also, participants were randomly assigned to their group, which ensures that the groups are equal on everything except the intervention. This design allows for more conclusive evidence about the effect of mindful eating training on impulsive eating compared to other designs. Findings from this study suggest that mindful eating interventions can decrease impulsive food choices, which could lead to weight loss. Mindful-eating training could also be a potential prevention strategy for impulsive eating, thus preventing obesity. Future research should investigate the long-term effects of mindful-eating interventions since this study only looked at short-term effects.

Hendrickson, K. L., & Rasmussen, E. B. (2017). Mindful eating reduces impulsive food choice in adolescents and adults. Health Psychology36(3), 226.

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What Explains How People Feel During and After Exercise?

We all know that exercising is good for us. Yet, few of us engage in regular exercise. One reason individuals may choose to exercise or to not to exercise is that an individual may feel good or bad during exercise. For example, the better someone feels during exercise, the more likely they are to exercise regularly.

In a recently published study from our lab we identified factors that help explain how people feel during and after exercise. Specifically, we had healthy young adults complete measures of anticipatory affect factors (affective attitudes, implicit associations, and affective associations), anticipated affect factors (anticipated regret, anticipated pride), and cognitive factors (self-efficacy, intentions). Anticipatory affect is the experience of pleasant or unpleasant feelings while thinking about or anticipating exercise. Anticipated affect is the expectation of how one will feel after completing an exercise session, such as anticipated pride or anticipated regret. Cognitive factors include self-efficacy (i.e., the belief that one is able to perform a specific behavior) and behavioral intentions (i.e., a belief about one’s readiness to perform a behavior). After completing measures, participants ran or walked for 20-minutes on a treadmill and answered questions on how they were feeling during and after the exercise.

We found that both regret and pride (anticipated affect) and anticipatory affect variables accounted for unique aspects of how people feel during and after exercise. Only anticipatory affect uniquely accounted for affective response immediately post-exercise. There were no associations between the affective and cognitive factors and affective response 5-10 minutes post-exercise. We also found that the associations between exercise self-efficacy and how people feel during exercise was due to the overlap that self-efficacy has with affective factors.

Overall, we found unique associations between affective, but not cognitive, factors and affective response to exercise. Findings from this study highlight the importance of considering multiple factors simultaneously to understand unique predictors to affective response. Future research should identify the extent to which these various factors overlap and the extent to which they are distinct.  Findings also suggest that it is possible that intervening on affective factors may result in improved affective response to exercise, which could increase exercise behavior. Future research should examine this possibility.

Sala, M., Baldwin, A. S., & Williams, D. M. (2016). Affective and cognitive predictors of affective response to exercise: Examining unique and overlapping variance. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 27, 1-8.