Training Dieters to Eat Intuitively with a Mobile Application

Abstract

Weight loss is commonly recommended to prevent cardiometabolic diseases like hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. Rather than lead to a long-term healthy weight, dieting can result in weight cycling, which has been shown to be more harmful to health than being overweight. An emerging solution to prevent both excess weight gain and weight cycling is to avoid extremes of hunger and fullness by eating intuitively. Intuitive eating or mindful eating means tuning into interoceptive cues of hunger and fullness to guide when and how much to eat. Mindful eating has been linked to both heart, and metabolic health. It is, however, often labor intensive to retrain chronic dieters to intuitively eat what they need, and nothing more. This study describes a mobile health application that mimics an in-office intuitive eating coaching session. It utilizes homeostasis concepts, and components of the Health Belief Model; including, cues to action, phone prompts, minimal barriers to use, and self-efficacy through repeated immediate feedback. It is expected that this innovation could assist or replace the more labor-intensive in-person methods that exist to train previous dieters to eat intuitively. An enhanced description of this mobile application, the PaleoIntuitive app, is presented in this paper along with a discussion of its expected impact on health behavior.