Preliminary study of a Yoga Program to catalyze health behavior change

描述（由申请人提供）：身心练习，如瑜伽和冥想，已被证明对减轻压力和增进健康非常有效。一些证据还表明，这些做法可能会促进健康行为，如改变饮食和锻炼。来自克里帕卢瑜伽与健康中心的一组瑜伽老师开发了一套标准化的16周哈达瑜伽课程，重点是提高健康技能。初步数据显示，该项目可以减轻压力，增强正念和自我同情。我们的目标是获得对健康行为的影响大小的初步估计，并确定项目和家庭瑜伽的最佳“剂量”。我们还将获得有关感兴趣的机制变量的额外信息，并评估我们实验设计的各个方面的可行性。目前的研究结果将确定使用瑜伽课程改变健康行为的可行性，并将提供有关瑜伽课程可能起作用的潜在机制的有价值的初步信息。这些信息将允许我们设计一个大型随机对照试验来正式测试该方案的有效性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mind-body practices such as yoga and meditation have been shown to be highly effective for reducing stress and enhancing wellness. Some evidence also suggests that these practices may promote health behaviors such as changes in diet and exercise. A team of yoga teachers from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health have developed a standardized 16-week hatha yoga program which focuses on promoting skills for wellness. Preliminary data suggest that the program reduces stress and increases mindfulness and self-compassion. Our goal is to obtain preliminary estimates of effect sizes for health behaviors and to determine the optimal 'dose' of the program and home yoga to prescribe. We will also obtain additional information about mechanistic variables of interest and assess the feasibility of various aspects of our experimental design. The results of the current study will establish the feasibility of using the yoga program to change health behaviors and will also provide valuable preliminary information about potential mechanisms through which the yoga program may be working. This information will then allow us to design a large RCT to formally test the efficacy of this program.