Title: Understanding the relationship between stress, distress and healthy lifestyle behaviour: a qualitative study of patients and general practitioners

In this paper, we present the Persuasive Mirror, an example of persuasive technology, created at the Accenture Technology Labs, which aims at encouraging people to keep up a healthy lifestyle. Personal reflection and visual awareness of daily activity are the means used to motivate people to do regular exercise and eat sensibly.

Financial incentives are widely used in health behavior interventions. However, self-determination theory posits that emphasizing financial incentives can have negative consequences if experienced as controlling. Feeling controlled into performing a behavior tends to reduce enjoyment and undermine maintenance after financial contingencies are removed (the undermining effect). We assessed partic...

The objective of this cross-sectional, comparative study was to describe the demographic, socioeconomic and health characteristics of elderly voluntary workers of a Non-governmental organization of Porto Alegre, and investigate the influence of voluntary work and the referred characteristics on the subjects’ self-perception of health, compared to a paired group of elderly individuals who did no...

Service evaluation of a community-based healthy lifestyle programme, designed for families aimed at preventing obesity. Physiological and behaviour measures were recorded at the beginning and end of the programme. Out of a total of 454 participants, 358 (79%) completed. From these completers 293 (64%) were analysed as there was sufficient data. The use of "high visibility recruitment" led to 77...

We are all well aware that rising levels of obesity in developed countries is having a significant impact on the health of the population. This is despite the availability of a wide range of low-calorie foods and an awareness of how important it is to adopt a healthy lifestyle. A new and emerging approach is to design foods that enhance the physiological regulatory mechanisms controlling appeti...

BACKGROUND A history of preeclampsia is a risk factor for the future development of hypertension and cardiovascular disease (CVD). The objective of this study was to assess, in women with prior preeclampsia, the level of knowledge regarding the link between preeclampsia and CVD, motivators for and barriers to lifestyle change and interest in a lifestyle modification program to decrease CVD risk...

Obesity and eating disorders (EDs) are both prevalent in adolescents. There are concerns that obesity prevention efforts may lead to the development of an ED. Most adolescents who develop an ED did not have obesity previously, but some teenagers, in an attempt to lose weight, may develop an ED. This clinical report addresses the interaction between obesity prevention and EDs in teenagers, provi...

Diabetes mellitus is a leading cause of mortality and increased disability-adjusted life years worldwide. In Korea, the prevalence of diabetes increased from 8.6% to 11.0% in 2001 to 2013 and the prevalence of adult obesity, which is the most important risk factor of diabetes, increased from 29.2% to 31.8% during the same period. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of obese Koreans...

It has been established that social processes play an important role in achieving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but there are still gaps in the knowledge on how to apply such processes in behavior change interventions. One of these mechanisms is social comparison, i.e. the tendency to self-evaluate by comparing oneself to others. Social comparison can be either downward or upward, depend...