Healthy eating group (‘HE’)
eating behavior
Within week 1, we provided participants with an in-person 50-minute counseling session with a trained health counselor geared towards developing goals to improve eating behavior, along with three 10-minute booster phone calls at weeks 1, 4, and 8. The counseling session incorporated a motivational interviewing framework to assess areas of concern around eating behavior and to establish specific and achievable eating-related goals. We also asked participants to engage with a digitally-based mindful eating program once per week for 8 weeks, and sent text message reminders 3 times per week to increase accountability towards eating-related goals. The digitally-based mindful eating program was created specifically for this study by the research team, and was primarily a secured website that included information on mindful eating, and audio tools for mindful eating practice (~3–5 minute practices). This password-secured website contained up to six different brief audio exercises using mindful eating and urge-surfing strategies. The audio exercises were scripted and recorded by the study’s first author and adapted from a number of mindful eating resources including the mindfulness-based eating awareness training (MB-EAT) curriculum [