Crumbs: Lightweight Daily Food Challenges to Promote Engagement and Mindfulness.

Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine : daily food challenges completed by consuming one food that meets the challenge. We examine crumbs through developing and deploying the iPhone application . In a 3-week field study with 61 participants, crumbs supported engagement and mindfulness while offering opportunities to learn about food. Our 2×2 study compared versus crumbs coupled with versus features. crumbs often felt more purposeful to participants, but crumbs increased mindfulness more than crumbs. features helped sustain engagement and were important for engagement with crumbs. features also enabled learning about the variety of foods other people use to meet a challenge.