Persuasive technology for overcoming food cravings and improving snack choices

Abstract

A central challenge in weight management is the difficulty of overcoming desires for excessive and unhealthy food. Yet, studies show that when people are able to resist their desires for unhealthy choices, they experience pride and satisfaction. In order to alleviate the former and support the latter, we designed, implemented and tested a mobile application for improving snacking behavior. Our application delivers a food craving reduction intervention at the moment of need and allows users to track how often they successfully resisted cravings. Our craving reduction intervention is based on recent research that shows that food cravings can be reduced through imagery techniques. We conducted a week-long evaluation of our application, comparing the effectiveness of our application to a basic tracking application. We found that our imagery application significantly reduced both overall snacking and unhealthy snacking compared to a simple snack-tracking application.

Playing Tetris decreases drug and other cravings in real world settings

“…Knäuper et al (2011) also measured consumption of the specific item craved and found no effect of task on indulgence. In contrast, Kemps and Tiggemann (2013) and Hsu et al (2014) found that visual interventions decreased overall consumption. This may be an important difference that future research could address by measuring both overall consumption, for any foods, and consumption of the specific foods for which craving is reported.…”

“…Third, this study recruited an unrestricted sample whereas Kemps and Tiggemann (2013), Hsu et al (2014) and Knäuper et al (2011) recruited participants who had a high number of food cravings, wanted to reduce their snacking behaviour, or wanted to reduce their cravings. Those populations may have had stronger motivation to decrease their indulgence rates whereas our sample may have been contented with their indulgence rates and still have chosen to indulge even when their craving was weakened.…”

“…As predicted by EI theory, participants who vividly imagined a favourite activity whenever cravings struck reported weaker cravings than those who recited the alphabet backwards. Hsu et al (2014) built a mobile application, iCrave, based on EI theory, which prompted vivid, neutral imagery. Participants who used the app reported less snacking and greater ease of abstaining that those who simply used an app to track their snacking.…”

The Elaborated Intrusion Theory of desire: A 10-year retrospective and implications for addiction treatments

“…There were no such changes for groups who formed implementation intentions to reduce their craving, without explicit imagery instructions, or who performed the verbal task of counting backwards. Hsu et al (2014) trialed a smartphone app (iCrave), which gave written instructions to create specified neutral images when users craved snacks, and asked users to record both snacking and successful behavioral control. Over a week, community volunteers using iCrave ate fewer unhealthy snacks (but similar amounts of healthy snacks) as others who simply tracked their snacking.…”

Lunchocracy

“…Food decision making is influenced by factors that vary across and within individuals, depending on timing and context, cultural, social and personal differences as well as an own personal system that balances all previous factors [9]. Previous work in HCI explored persuasive technologies that support an individual's decision process of, for example, overcoming unhealthy cravings [6]. Svensson et al [11] showed an affirmative influence others have on user's recipe choice when being navigated through a recipe recommender system by the means of other user's actions.…”