A Brief Virtual ACT Workshop for Emotional Eating
Phase: NA
Conditions: Emotional Eating, Eating Behavior
Sponsor: McGill University

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Brief Virtual ACT Workshop for Emotional Eating Study Protocol 
Di Sante, Frayn & Knäuper 
 
June 11th 2020 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Methodology/Procedures  
1. Recruitment: Advertisements will be placed in McGill University’s staff newsletter with an 
e-mail address for interested participants contact the research team via a given e-mail 
address. Explanations of the workshop and research study will be sent to interested 
participants and different timeslots will be offered. Interested participants will be asked to list 
their availabilities in order of preference so that they may be assigned into groups. They will 
be sent a confirmation e-mail with the date of the workshop and a link to an online 
questionnaire (baseline questionnaire) which will include the consent form.  
2. Baseline assessments: All participants will read the consent form (and agree to participate 
using a checkbox), and complete a demographics questionnaire, the DEBQ-EE, the Distress 
Tolerance Scale (DTS; Simons & Gaher, 2005), the Food Acceptance and Awareness 
Questionnaire (FAAQ; Juarascio, Forman, Timko, Butryn, & Goodwin, 2011), and the 
Mindful Eating Questionnaire (MEQ; Framson et al., 2009) prior to attending the workshop. 
They will also be asked a series of questions pertaining to values clarification and 
commitment in relation to emotional eating. Finally, they will be asked to complete two 
additional items recording the number of times they engaged in emotional eating as well as 
how much often they were able to stop emotional eating after starting. These items were 
developed by the authors. All questionnaires will be completed online through Qualtrics.   
3. Intervention: Workshops will be 3 hours in length (delivered over the course of 2, 1.5h 
sessions held 1-week apart) and held via the Zoom online platform on different dates. They 
will be facilitated by the author of the workshop manual, Mallory Frayn, a clinical 
psychology PhD candidate. The intervention will be modeled after Frayn et al.’s (2019) 
intervention, which was a 1-day ACT workshop derived from Forman et al.’s (2013) “Mind 

Your Health program”. During the workshop, the following topics will be discussed, based 
on the three processes of ACT relevant to emotional eating identified in Forman and Butryn’s 
(2014) review:  
Session 1 
(1) Values Clarification and Commitment  
a. Exploring values and why it is important for participants to reduce their emotional eating. 
Values clarification will be emphasized to allow participants to identify that emotional 
eating is inconsistent with values pertaining to health and wellness. This values 
clarification will set the framework for motivating alternative, value- consistent 
behaviours.  
b. Using values to make decisions and to engage in committed action (teaching the BOLD 
technique and walking participants through examples). Participants will be asked to 
brainstorm alternative, value-consistent behaviours that do not involve eating.  
(2) Acceptance/Distress Tolerance  
a. Introducing acceptance, specifically acceptance of negative emotions, within the ACT 
model (e.g., use tug-of-war metaphor and dropping the rope to elucidate this). Using 
acceptance in the context of emotional eating to explain that participants do not have to 
respond to their negative emotions by eating.  
(3) Mindfulness/Awareness applied to emotions  
a. Introducing mindfulness for emotional awareness. Using awareness of physical 
sensations related to emotions, with an emphasis on the separation of thoughts and 
physical sensations related to emotions, to help recognize emotional arousal in the 
context of emotional eating.  

Session 2 
(1) Acceptance/Distress Tolerance  
a. Introducing the concept of urge surfing, allowing participants to normalize cravings 
that arise as a result of negative emotions. Teaching participants concrete steps to 
employ urge surfing to sit with negative emotions and cravings, rather than acting on 
them by eating.  
(2) Mindfulness/Awareness applied to eating   
a. Introducing mindful eating and mindfulness of hunger/satiety signals. Participants 
will be asked to participate in an exercise where they are taught to mindfully eat a 
chosen food that they will have on hand. Mindful eating will be applied to emotional 
eating, as emotional eating is typically a mindless experience. Participants will be 
encouraged to pay mindful awareness of their hunger/satiety cues, and eat mindfully 
in a way that is physically and psychologically satisfying. An overview of 
hunger/satiety signal awareness and monitoring will be provided.  
(3) Program review, habit formation, and commitment to values 
a. Following the introduction and application of these three techniques, a discussion will 
be held to review what was taught and to identify which techniques resonate most 
with participants. The facilitator will answer/clarify any questions people may have 
about any of the concepts taught. Towards the end of the second session, the 
facilitator will also introduce the concept of habit formation and the importance of 
practicing the techniques such that they become automatic. The workshop will 
conclude with committed action, bringing the discussion back to the commitment to 
values discussed at beginning of session.  

4. Post-intervention, 2-weeks and 3-month follow-ups: At these time points, participants will 
be asked to complete the same battery of questionnaires they completed prior to taking the 
workshop. The purpose of these follow-up assessments is to assess changes in these variables 
from baseline to post-intervention, 2-weeks and 3-months post-intervention to examine the 
effectiveness of the workshop in the short and long term.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

References 
Forman, E. M., & Butryn, M. L. (2014). A new look at the science of weight control: How 
acceptance and commitment strategies can address the challenge of self-regulation. 
Appetite, 84, 171-180. 
Forman, E. M., Butryn, M. L., Juarascio, A. S., Bradley, L. E., Lowe, M. R., Herbert, J. D., & 
Shaw, J. A. (2013). The mind your health project: A randomized controlled trial of an 
innovative behavioral treatment for obesity. Obesity, 21, 1119-1126.  
Framson, C., Kristal, A. R., Schenk, J. M., Littman, A. J., Zeliadt, S., & Benitez, D. (2009). 
Development and validation of the mindful eating questionnaire. Journal of the American 
Dietetic Association, 109(8), 1439-1444. 
Frayn, M., Khanyari, S., & Knäuper, B. (2019). A 1-day acceptance and commitment therapy 
workshop leads to reductions in emotional eating in adults. Eating and Weight Disorders-
Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity, 1-13. 
Juarascio, A., Forman, E., Timko, A., Butryn, M., & Goodwin, C. (2011). The development and 
validation of the food craving acceptance and action questionnaire (FAAQ). Eating 
Behaviors, 12, 182-187. 
Simons, J. S., & Gaher, R. M. (2005). The Distress Tolerance Scale: Development and validation 
of a self-report measure. Motivation and Emotion, 29, 83-102.  
van Strien, T., Frijters, J., Bergers, G., & Defares, P. B. (1986). The Dutch Eating Behavior 
Questionaire (DEBQ) for assessment of restrained, emotional, and external eating 
behavior. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 5, 295-315.