Body weight is an issue of growing concern in Western societies, as the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased markedly over the last decades. In many industrialized countries, more than half of the population is now considered too heavy (e.g., Ogden et al., 2006). As overweight and obesity are associated with severe health risks as well as negative social implications, many people try to regulate their weight by dieting. However, although such efforts at weight regulation are often successful initially, most dieters do not maintain their weight loss in the long term, or even regain more weight than they lost in the first place (Jeffery et al., 2000; see Mann et al., 2007, for a review). Apparently, it is very difficult for dieters to resist the temptation of eating attractive, high-calorie foods, even when these interfere with long-term health goals.
A number of theories have been proposed to explain the eating behavior of overweight people and of dieters in order to understand these failures of self-regulation. Most of these theories are based on the assumption that eating behavior is regulated homeostatically in response to signals of hunger and satiety, and that this mechanism is somehow disturbed in individuals withproblems in eating regulation, such as overweight people and dieters (e.g., Bruch, 1961; Herman & Polivy, 1984). The boundary model of eating regulation (Herman & Polivy, 1984), for example, suggests that while non-dieters eat in response to cues of hunger and satiety, dieters regulate their eating behavior by means of consciously controlled processes because they are insensitive to such homeostatic cues for eating.
However, human eating behavior is to a large part driven by the hedonic aspects of food, such as its palatability, rather than by purely homeostatic factors (e.g., Pinel, Assanand, & Lehman, 2000). People differ with regard to their sensitivity to these hedonic aspects of food, and this sensitivity has been suggested to play a crucial role in the difficulties of eating regulation and overweight (e.g., Yeomans, Blundell, & Leshem, 2004; Lowe & Butryn, 2007; Lowe & Levine, 2005). Numerous studies have shown that chronic dieters have stronger appetitive responses to attractive food than non-dieters, including cravings, increased salivation, and overeating (e.g., Fedoroff, Polivy, & Herman, 1997; Stirling & Yeomans, 2004). In addition, our living environment confronts us with an abundance of palatable food cues continuously, and it has been suggested that such a “toxic environment” contributes to dieters’ difficulties in weight-regulation (Wadden, Brownell, & Foster, 2002). Thus, increased sensitivity to palatable food cues could interfere with dieters’ attempts at self-regulation.
The present dissertation combines these findings on the hedonic responses to food with recent developments in social psychology to a novel approach to dieters’ eating behavior. As recent research in social psychology has shown, much of human behavior is triggered by environmental cues and guided by non conscious processes, so that we are often not aware of the factors that actually cause our behavior (Bargh, 1990; Aarts, Goll witzer, & Hassin, 2004). This opens the intriguing possibility that attractive food cues trigger such non conscious processes in dieters that make it more likely that they will overeat, without them being aware of these influences. The present dissertation examines the role of such non conscious processes in dieters’ self-regulation to understand how the perception of attractive food cues in the environment can interfere with the pursuit of their long-term goal of weight control.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction and overview
Chapter 2: Understanding dieting: A social cognitive analysis of hedonic processes in self-regulation
Chapter 3: Pleasure in the mind: restrained eating and spontaneous hedonic thoughts about food
Study 3.1
Study 3.2
Chapter 4: The allure of forbidden food: On the role of attention in self- regulation
Study 4.1
Study 4.2
Chapter 5: Healthy cognition: Processes of self-regulatory success in restrained
eating
Study 5.1
Study 5.2
References
Samenvatting – Summary in Dutch
Dankwoord – Acknowledgements
Curriculum Vitae
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