Young adults’ use of food as a self-therapeutic intervention

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate how young adults use their lived body as a starting point for lifestyle explorations and as a strategy for well-being. The transcripts of 10 interviews with persons 18 to 33 years old, collected in Sweden, were analysed for variation in the practises and experiences related to this way of using food. An application of the descriptive phenomenological psychological research method guided the process. The young adults were: (1) listening to the body; (2) moderating conditions and feelings; (3) developing vitality and resilience; (4) creating mindful space for rest, and (5) participating in creative activity. The results show how young adults perceive their choice of food and related practises associated with positive feelings and experiences as ways to promote well-being and mitigate different problems in life. The usefulness of knowledge about how young adults try to use food for self-therapy by enhancing mind-body awareness is discussed in relation to health issues and food-related interventions.

The Way Forward in Mindfulness and Sustainability: a Critical Review and Research Agenda

“…The advantage of qualitative methods is their potential to explore the differences in the experiences, reasoning, feelings, and motivations of mindfulness practitioners and non-practitioners, which might reveal new investigative branches that so far have fallen through the net of quantitative research. To date, only a small fraction of studies in the field apply qualitative methods, mostly constituting only one part in larger mixed methods studies (Armstrong 2012;Von Essen and Mårtensson 2014;Böhme et al 2018;Frank et al 2019b;Geiger et al 2019a;Stanszus et al 2019). The lack of qualitative studies exploring the questions why and how mindfulness might impact environmental awareness and PEB is surprising for such a recently emerging area of research.…”

Brain Potentials Highlight Stronger Implicit Food Memory for Taste than Health and Context Associations

“…For example, dieting people assigned greater importance to nutrition information available on food products when evaluating healthiness [ 10 ]. Analogous to this, it was found that people associated their healthy food choice with positive feelings as ways to promote well-being [ 11 ]. Altogether, these studies show that different associations affect food choice.…”

Parental involvement could mitigate the effects of physical activity and dietary habits on mental distress in Ghanaian youth

“…More specifically, disordered eating contributes to both suicide ideation and depressive symptoms [ 20 ]. Some studies have also shown that the choice to use vegetables in food may help individuals to separate themselves from disturbing thoughts [ 21 ] just as fruit and vegetable intake are significantly associated with lower odds of depression and distress [ 22 ]. Furthermore, consumption of fast food is associated with a higher risk of depression [ 23 ].…”

“…For example, parents could influence their children’s engagement in physical activity through their role modelling of physical activity and beliefs about their child’s competence [ 28 ] and through encouragement [ 29 ], which in turn could have a positive effect on mental health [ 18 , 19 , 20 ]. Furthermore, parental presence at evening meals is positively associated with adolescents’ higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, and dairy foods [ 30 ] which could in turn result in various mental health outcomes [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Again parental fruit and vegetable intake, knowledge of intake recommendations and skills have been found to have a positive association with children’s intakes [ 31 ].…”