Family-Based Mindful Eating Intervention for Overweight Adolescents

With currently 35% of U.S. adolescents being overweight and one in six having metabolic syndrome, adolescent obesity is one of the major global health challenges of the 21st century. Few enduring treatment strategies have been identified in adolescent populations and the majority of standard weight loss programs fail to adequately address the impact of psychological factors on eating behavior and the beneficial contribution of parental involvement in adolescent behavior change. A critical need exists to expand treatment development efforts beyond traditional education and cognitive-behavioral programs and to explore alternative treatment models for adolescent obesity. Meditation-based mindful eating programs may represent a unique and novel scientific approach to the current adolescent obesity epidemic as they address key psychological variables affecting weight. Furthermore, the recent expansion of mindfulness programs to include family relationships shows the immense potential for broadening the customarily individual focus of this intervention to include broader factors thought to influence adolescent health outcomes. Thus, we propose to develop a mindful eating approach to eating behavior and weight loss specifically tailored for adolescents and their families. The first phase of our three phase development process will be devoted to adapting an adolescent protocol (Mindful Eating-A) based on an established mindful eating program currently being used with adult populations. We will then develop a 'family enhanced Mindful Eating-A' (Mindful Eating-A+F) protocol that integrates a family systems perspective. The goal of Mindful Eating-A+F is to expand the focus of Mindful Eating-A to include family factors that influence adolescent eating behaviors. The second design phase will consist of an initial test of both intervention components to provide feedback on usefulness and acceptability (N = 10 families). The final phase will examine the overall efficacy of the optimized Mindful Eating-A+F, relative to the Mindful Eating-A intervention with 30 overweight adolescents (BMI \> 85th percentile) ages 14-17 and at least one parent. Within this examination, post-treatment and 3-month follow-up comparisons across the two treatment approaches will be made and effect sizes within and between treatments will be assessed.