Exploring the Experience of Participants Applying a Brief Mindfulness Intervention in Response to Food Cravings for People Engaging in Emotional Eating Behaviour: A Thematic Analysis

Food cravings have been associated with several problematic eating behaviours like emotional eating and binge eating. Brief mindfulness-based interventions have been found to be effective in the reduction of food cravings. However, these findings mainly come from quantitative experimental studies and do not capture the subjective experience of the participants using the intervention.
This study aimed at exploring the experience of participants applying a brief mindfulness-based intervention for a seven-day practice period in response to food cravings. Ten participants, that self-identified as eating emotionally, listened to a four-minute recording of a mindfulness intervention for seven days every time they experienced a food craving. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and were analysed using thematic analysis. Four superordinate themes were produced by the analysis ‘The process of applying the mindfulness intervention’, ‘Components at work during the mindfulness intervention’, ‘Effects of the mindfulness intervention’ and ‘Life after’. Each superordinate theme contained several subordinate themes.
The results of this study indicated that a brief mindfulness intervention that combines the components of present moment awareness and decentering can have positive effects on food cravings and emotional eating for people who engage in such behaviour. The results of this study suggest that brief mindfulness interventions can be effective and can have a practical application by being easily incorporated into participants’ everyday lives. These results also add to the literature about the effectiveness of brief mindfulness interventions on the reduction of food cravings.
These findings could inform clinical practice and the development of effective and targeted brief mindfulness interventions for people engaging in emotional eating.