Prevention & Promotion in the Treatment of Obesity

Making healthy food choices requires sacrificing immediate pleasures of consuming high calorie foods in order to achieve long-term health goals. Two strategies to encourage such future thinking are 1) focusing on the long-term consequences of consuming unhealthy foods, and 2) focusing on the long-term benefits of avoiding these unhealthy foods. Two novel behavioral weight loss (BWL) interventions will be developed based on these strategies (PREVENT and PROMOTE) and compared to standard Internet-delivered BWL to test their feasibility and efficacy in changing food choice decision-making, reducing food cravings, and ultimate weight loss.