I am currently looking for participants who would be willing to take part in my University dissertation research, which is going to look at the relationships between different calorie deficits, reasons for dieting, calorie intake, weight loss, health beliefs and adherence to diet. Essentially the research will involve completing a few short questionnaires and recording your diet on myfitnesspal.com following your own self-determined diet. You will not be asked to follow any particular diet or plan and I ask that you make your own choices about the diet that you follow.
To begin with, you will be asked to sign up for an account on www.myfitnesspal.com (via computer or smart phone) and to allow the researcher (username: billycraig) access to your daily records via the website privacy settings. Once this access has been granted, you will be sent a couple of questionnaires to complete that should take no longer than 5 minutes. I will then ask you to record your daily calorie intake for 31 days, aiming to achieve whatever daily calorie target that you wish according to your weight loss goals (myfitnesspal will assist you in calculating the target). You will be sent a questionnaire to complete two weeks into the study and another couple of questionnaires at the end of the 31-day period. The two sets of questionnaires should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete.
All of the information that you provide during the study will remain confidential and all of the collected data will be analysed at a group level, therefore you will not be identified as an individual in the research report. If you agree to take part in the study but decide at a later date that you no longer wish to be involved, you are entitled to withdraw your data at any point by contacting myself. Please note that you can withdraw your data up to two weeks after taking part in the study ? after that time the data will have been analysed and it will be impossible to remove individual data points from the group analysis. The results collected during this study will form the basis of a University MSc dissertation. Again, I want to re-iterate that confidentiality will be maintained at all times.
Once the data collection is complete I will be back to update you all with an article that gives you a greater insight into the study.If you are interested in taking part in this study it would be greatly appreciated. If so, please contact me via email (B.Craig1@unimail.derby.ac.uk) and I will send you more information, which you can review before deciding whether you wish to continue any further.