Beyond Weight Loss: Exploring Wellbeing and Lifestyle Outcomes in Digital Weight Management Interventions

Obesity has been a major public health concern for decades. Digital weight management interventions (DWMIs) offer promising solutions, yet prior work has rarely assessed broader changes in wellbeing and lifestyle outcomes alongside weight management. We conducted a within-subject field study to examine changes in users' emotional, psychological, and behavioural states across six key outcomes after 6 of the 12-week real-world weight management intervention (WMI). Results showed significant improvements in mental wellbeing at the post-study time point (SWEMWBS, W = 45.5, p = .003), while eating disorder risk also changed (SCOFF, W = 40, p = .035). In exploratory demographic analyses, negative affect reduced among participants without disabilities than those with (U = 170.5, p = .014), and participants living with someone showed a trend towards greater improvements in health promoting lifestyle (U = 128.5, p = .064). The user-centred evaluation of our platform yielded promising results for feature satisfaction and intention to reuse. These findings reflect the psychological complexity of obesity and internalised weight stigma, suggesting a nuanced pattern in which mental wellbeing improvements may occur alongside emotional challenges and behavioural changes during a WMI. Our findings further imply that next-generation DWMIs should more explicitly account for wellbeing and lifestyle factors and harness the potential of AI-based systems to better support diverse user needs and improve effectiveness, accessibility and user experience.