Negative Mood and Food Craving Strength Among Women with Overweight: Implications for Targeting Mechanisms Using a Mindful Eating Intervention

When experiencing negative mood, people often eat to improve their mood. A learned association between mood and eating may cultivate frequent food cravings, detracting from health goals. Training in mindful eating may target this cycle of emotion-craving-eating by teaching individuals to manage urges when experiencing negative mood. We examined the impact of a mobile mindful eating intervention on the link between negative mood and food cravings among overweight women.

In a single-arm trial, participants (n = 64, M age = 46.1 years, M BMI = 31.5 kg/m²) completed ecological momentary assessments of negative mood and food cravings 3 times/day for 3 days pre- and post-intervention, as well as 1-month post-intervention. Using multilevel linear regression, we compared associations between negative mood and food craving strength at pre- vs. post-intervention (model 1) and post-intervention vs. 1-month follow-up (model 2).

In model 1, negative mood interacted with time point (β =  − .20, SE = .09, p = .02, 95% CI [− .38, − .03]) to predict craving strength, indicating that the within-person association between negative mood and craving strength was significantly weaker at post-intervention (β = 0.18) relative to pre-intervention (β = 0.38). In model 2, negative mood did not interact with time point to predict craving strength (β = .13, SE = .09, p = .10, 95% CI − .03, .31]); the association did not significantly differ between post-intervention and 1-month follow-up.

Training in mindful eating weakened the mood-craving association from pre- to post-intervention. The weakened association remained at follow-up. Our findings highlight the mood-craving link as a target-worthy mechanism of mindful eating that should be assessed in clinical trials.

NCT02694731