A.I.M. for Health

I've been doing so much searching, reading, and typing lately!  A lot of it has been related to weight gain prevention interventions and Internet-based obesity prevention interventions.  So, it doesn't feel like work to me - I really love reading this stuff.

I'm so excited about doing an intervention that I've started to play around with plopping bits and pieces of others' research onto a free website to get ideas of what my intervention could look like.  In fact, I spent about 2 hours chatting online with an IT guy named "Paul" as we worked together to figure out how to get Tylka's Intuitive Eating Scale onto the site and have it scored correctly.

Poor Paul.

I was having issues. Lots and lots of issues.  I think this image sums up how helpful Paul was when I couldn't find the "+" button to add the test that I made out of Tylka's questionnaire:

I'm not entirely sure if I'll develop the site or if we'll get a sweet grant to pay for a developer, but it's still fun to take breaks from acceptance/intuitive eating/mindfulness literature searches to do something which has a more tangible output.

Yesterday, I met with a researcher at Otago who's running an Internet-based depression intervention.  She was great fun to talk to because she's knowledgeable about the process of testing content for the intervention, working with a web developer, recruiting participants and so on.  She got me really excited for what I could do down the road!  She also got me thinking about all the work involved: running focus groups to discuss Internet-based weight gain prevention interventions, developing content, locating experts in the field to review the content, developing the website for the intervention, testing the content with a sample from the target population, etcetera.

But, I have a bad habit of putting the cart before the horse.  Or, in this case, the intervention before the data to back up the intervention. *sigh* This means I actually need to sit my rump down, re-introduce myself to Stata, and run an analysis or two...or three... to figure out if our hypotheses about intuitive eating, experiential avoidance, psychological inflexibility, and mindfulness hold water (a.k.a. justify targeting these predictors of weight gain in an intervention). *fingers crossed* With some luck (or, a visit from the Motivation Fairy) I will get around to this very, very soon.

RESEARCH IS FUN!