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The study examined to what extent emotional eating, restrained eating, and bulimic tendencies are found together in naturally occurring groups, and whether these groups differ in terms of the psychological characteristics relevant to eating disorders. One hundred twenty-seven normal-weight women filled in The Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire, The Eating Attitudes Test, The Eating Disorder Inventory, and five measures of psychological well-being. Cluster analysis revealed three dieter subgroups (Normal Dieters, Emotional Dieters, and Bulimic Dieters) and one nondieter group. The results showed that only some restrained eaters were emotional eaters and that only some emotional eaters had bulimic tendencies. In addition, emotional and bulimic dieters differed from nondieters more strikingly in terms of eating disorder psychopathology and low psychological well-being than normal dieters did. The results suggest that emotional eating is not responsible for overeating only but may, in concert with chronic dieting, also relate to the general psychopathology found to underlie eating disorders.

This article discusses various notions of continuity and discontinuity relating to eating disorders, and suggests that current research on the subject is implicitly based on hypotheses on linearity. In this study, we tested these hypotheses by asking 265 female participants to complete the Eating Attitude Test (EAT) and Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI). We found a linear increase in psychological disturbances from normalcy to the milder forms of disordered eating, but a sharp and non-linear increase among the women with more severe signs of eating disorders. The results indicate that neither linearity nor non-linearity alone sufficiently describes the relationship between predisposing factors and eating disorder symptomatology.