cause & consequences of cognitive
restriction of food. attempting not to eat
increases probability of overeating.
supporting study assigned obese women to
restrained eating, exercise or no treatment
group. Food intake & appetite were assessed
in 2 lab conditions, & for both, women in the
restraint group ate more than women in the
other groups.
shows that
overeating shown
by many dieters is
actually caused by
their attempts to
diet.
does not explain how the
minority do succeed at weight
loss through restrained eating.
anorexics also experience
huge weight loss without
recourse to overeating.
individual differences contribute to success
rates: low restrainers find dieting easy &
high restrainers find it difficult as they may
be hypersensitive to food cues & likely to
abandon diets & one study found that they
could not resist forbidden chocolate.
challenging studies: pre-load/taste-test methodology used & found dieters do consume fewer calories after both low & high calorie pre-loads. tests like these
are set in a lab and are highly unrealistic, lacking ecological validity as they cannot be generalised to real world settings. More naturalistic experiments
used dietary self-monitoring forms & have also found dieters do eat less than non-restrained eaters & don't fall prey to overeating.
the conflict between findings of
different studies may be due to
different measures to assess
dietary restraint. it may be that
some measures do not
incorporate overeating to the
same extent as the Restraint
Scale & this would explain why
some research has not found
dieters overeat.
the boundary level states that dieters set themselves a diet boundary & try to eat within
this self-imposed limit. but they sometimes break this boundary & binge until full because
their satiety boundary overrides the self-imposed boundary, leading to overeating.
DENIAL
attempting to suppress/deny a thought makes it even more
prominent. study asked participants not to think about a white bear
& others to do it. Had to ring a bell. Those who were told not to
think about it rang their bells far more often than the others. this
illustrates how denial often backfires
as denial of certain food is often central to most diets,
according to the denial theory above, those who try to
suppress thoughts of bad foods only increase the dieter's
preoccupation with the very foods they are trying to deny
themselves, inevitably denial creates more pressure to
break a diet
supporting study: restrained eaters divided into those who were high or
low in disinhibition. Disinhibited group, i.e. those who tried to eat less
but would often overeat, used more thought suppression than other
group & showed rebound effect i.e. thought more about food
afterwards. this shows that restrained eaters who tend to overeat try to
suppress thoughts about food more often but they end up thinking
about it more.
SUCCESS?
people like experiences less the more they
repeat them. when dieting, this makes it harder
to stick to a particular regime. to make it easier,
dieters should focus on the details of the meal
to get bored less easily & so stick to the diet.
participants were given a jelly bean at a
time & either shown general information or
detailed info about the bean. those who
only saw general info got bored of eating
them faster & those who saw details
enjoyed the task much more, giving
support for the theory
IDA: research into dieting is gender biased as it
focuses mainly on females so findings can't be
generalised to males. some dieting can have negative
consequences like development of anorexia & though
it occurs mainly in females, it has 15% incidence of
male sufferers so it is important to be able to
understand male eating behaviour too.