Emotional Eating

Gender and sexual minority adults in Bangladesh experience high levels of stigma-related stress. Acute stress can trigger strong, affect-driven urges to smoke, vape, or engage in stress-attributed eating. These urges can rise and fall within minutes to hours, operating outside the reach of conventional clinic-based interventions delivered days or weeks later. This pilot micro-randomized trial (MRT) evaluates whether delivering a brief, culturally adapted support message via smartphone during moments of high self-reported stress reduces the intensity of the urge for the participant's pre-specified target behaviour, relative to no message. Over a 24-day period, 115 participants will be scheduled for up to 5 ecological momentary assessments (EMA) per day. Whenever a participant reports an acute stress level of 5 or higher (0 to 10 scale) and satisfies pre-specified privacy, safety, behavioural, and spacing criteria, the app randomizes with probability 0.5 to deliver either a brief support message or no message. By contributing multiple randomized decision points over time, each participant serves as their own micro-control. The primary outcome is the intensity of the urge for the participant's pre-specified target behaviour, measured 45 to 60 minutes after randomization. An exploratory urge assessment is also collected 10 minutes after randomization; comparing the two time points will help establish whether the support message's effect is immediate, delayed, or both, and will inform the choice of follow-up window for a future, fully powered trial. Prior to trial launch, all EMA items, message content, notification logic, and digital safety protocols will be developed and tested with community members, reviewed by a Community Advisory Board, and locked. As a pilot optimization trial, its objectives are to estimate the short-term causal effect of the prompt, to identify the contexts in which that effect is larger or smaller, and to establish whether momentary assessment and just-in-time intervention research can be delivered safely, privately, and acceptably in this high-stigma setting. The study does not evaluate long-term behavioural maintenance and does not claim to address the underlying structural stigma and discrimination that produce minority stress.

In predominantly medication-naïve schizophrenic patients, those exhibiting partial metabolic disorders have significantly worse sleep quality and sleep onset time; poor sleep predicted metabolic dysregulation even after controlling for confounding factors. Mental health, sleep, and eating behavior interact in ways that strongly influence the risk of obesity and MetS. Emotional eating (eating in response to emotions rather than hunger) is central to this network and appears to be closely associated with psychiatric illnesses, particularly depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. There is a continuing need to elucidate the frequency, level, and relationship of emotional eating with other factors in individuals with SMI. Therefore, this study aims to elucidate this complex relationship, thereby shedding light on new ways to reduce metabolic risks in psychiatric patients.

The goal of this clinical trial is to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a digitally delivered, mindfulness-based nutrition group program for adults with obesity who are taking GLP-1 receptor agonist medication and receiving usual medical care, including dietetic counselling. The main questions this study aims to answer are: Can this online group program be successfully delivered to adults receiving GLP-1 treatment? Do participants find the program useful, acceptable, and easy to engage with? Are participants willing to attend the online sessions, complete the home exercises, and complete the study questionnaires? Researchers will compare participants who receive the online mindfulness-based nutrition group program in addition to usual care with participants who receive usual care alone. Participants in the intervention group will take part in a 16-week online program consisting of nine live group sessions delivered via videoconference. They will practice mindful eating, mindfulness exercises, reflective journaling, and peer discussion. All participants will complete online questionnaires and body measurements at baseline, after 16 weeks, and 12 months after the start of the study. This study does not evaluate a new drug or medical device. The study team will not make decisions regarding participants' GLP-1 medication. All medication management remains part of routine medical care.

This study aims to evaluate the effects of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)-based group therapy program, combined with an ACT-based mobile app, on emotional eating, emotion regulation, and psychological flexibility in overweight individuals. Emotional eating is a condition in which individuals frequently use eating behavior as a coping mechanism for negative emotions. Participants will be randomly assigned to intervention groups receiving ACT-based group therapy, ACT-based group therapy combined with an ACT-based mobile app, or a control group. The intervention will last six weeks and will include structured group sessions as well as mobile-based exercises, reminders, and coping strategies. Outcome measures will include emotional eating, emotion regulation, and psychological flexibility. Assessments will be conducted at baseline, post-intervention, and during the follow-up phase. The findings of this study are expected to contribute to the development of accessible and effective interventions for emotional eating.

The goal of this exploratory, interventional, multicentre study is to compare the prefrontal activity during a negative emotion regulation task in women with Binge-Eating Disorder (BED) and healthy women with and without Emotional Eating (EE). The aim of this study is to compare the prefrontal processing of cognitive control of emotions between BED and EE and to compare the emotional processing and emotional experience between BED and EE. The study will thus compare four experimental groups: patients with BED, BMI-matched healthy volunteers with EE, BMI-matched healthy volunteers, and healthy volunteers of normal weight without BED. Participants will perform a down-regulation task of negative emotions elicited by negative pictures. During this task, their cerebral activity will be recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), as well as their autonomous activity (skin conductance, pulse rate, respiration rate).