Grant: Project Grant

Currently, over 15 million Canadian adults are overweight or obese. Standard behavioral treatment programs are right now the most effective way to achieve lasting weight loss. Emotional eaters lose less weight in such programs and easily gain it back. Emotional eating is defined as overeating in response to negative emotions. The current proposal aims to find ways to make weight loss programs more effective for emotional eaters. We propose to do this by using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) techniques. ACT techniques are increasingly recognized as tools to avoid emotional overeating and help emotional eaters lose weight. Rather than trying to control negative emotions through change or problem solving (which has been shown not to work for emotional eaters), ACT techniques teach individuals to accept their negative emotions and to react to them in other ways than by eating. We propose to further strengthen the effectiveness of the weight loss program by training the emotional eaters to habitually apply ACT techniques when they have the urge to eat in response to emotions. We will assign overweight or obese emotional eaters randomly to either a standard behavioral treatment weight loss program or our ACT program. In the ACT program, participants will use concrete action plans (if-then plans) to apply ACT techniques to deal with negative emotions that would normally make them eat. In the standard program, participants will use if-then plans to apply cognitive behavioral techniques. We expect that the ACT program will lead to (1) greater and more sustained weight loss than the standard behavioral treatment program and (2) a greater reduction of weight-related risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases than the standard program. Further, we expect that (3) the greater weight loss is due to higher distress tolerance, better emotion coping habits, and less emotional eating.