Restrained Eating and Food Cues: Recent Findings and Conclusions

Abstract

Research over the last several years involves both replicating the work showing that restrained eaters respond to attractive food cues by eating more but unrestrained eaters show less responsiveness and extending this work to examine the mechanisms that might underlie this differential responsiveness. Labeling a food as healthy encourages more eating by restrained eaters, while diet-priming cues seem to curtail their consumption even in the face of attractive food cues. Work on cognitive responses indicates that restrained (but not unrestrained) eaters have both attention and memory biases toward food cues. Restrained eaters attend more strongly to food- and diet-related cues than do unrestrained eaters, as evidenced in both their eating behavior and their attention and memory responses to such cues. These effects interact with expectations and manner of presentation of such cues. What remains to be understood is the meaning and mechanism of the attention bias toward food cues in restrained eaters and the implications of such bias for overeating and overweight more broadly speaking.

Can Mindfulness Address Maladaptive Eating Behaviors? Why Traditional Diet Plans Fail and How New Mechanistic Insights May Lead to Novel Interventions

“…Such an environment plays a significant role in biasing control of eating behavior away from innate, internal processes (e.g., physiological hunger and satiety signals) to more external, artificial, or learned behavioral processes (e.g., seeing pictures of desirable foods). Continual exposure to such cues can alter our eating behavior in the short-term by triggering non-homeostatic eating (i.e., eating for reasons other than hunger) ( Lowe and Butryn, 2007 ), or encouraging restriction despite physiological hunger ( Polivy and Herman, 2017 ). While occasional episodes of over- or undereating should be considered part of “normal” eating behavior, over time, these cues may tap into our natural reward-based learning processes to cultivate habits of non-homeostatic eating and/or encourage recurrent binge-purge cycles in some populations ( Burger et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Women with eating disorders have been found to have an increased tendency to seek pleasurable experiences and avoid negative ones, which may underlie the binge-purge cycle ( Smyth et al, 2007 ; Eneva et al, 2017 ). In regards to non-clinical populations, diet-related food cues (e.g., descriptions of “diet-friendly” food or pictures of thin bodies) tend to reduce food intake among already restrained eaters ( Polivy and Herman, 2017 ), likely driven by the positive reinforcement of working toward or even reaching their body weight goals. Notably, restrained eating is associated with subsequent disinhibited, emotional, and/or binge eating ( Polivy and Herman, 1985 ; Ricca et al, 2009 ; Péneau et al, 2013 ), which may be due to increasing the reinforcing value of food through repeated deprivation ( Epstein et al, 2007 ).…”

Overeating in Restrained and Unrestrained Eaters

“…Decades of studies of eating in dieters document how dieters can be induced to succumb to temptation and eat more than they planned. Not only do dieters eat more when they have been induced to consume a diet-breaking preload, but their diets are disrupted by emotions [e.g., (1,57,58)], alcohol (24,59), or cognitive load/distraction (60); even merely seeing (19,61,62) or smelling (63) tempting foods can make restrained eaters abandon their diets. These disruptions of dietary restraint lead restrained eaters to abandon their diet goals for at least the short term, and instead to indulge in the foods they have been denying themselves.…”

Revisión del constructo y fundamentos teóricos de la alimentación emocional

“…En sintonía con la teoría del set point [38], la teoría de la restricción alimentaria argumenta que la conducta de ingesta emocional y/o por estímulos externos, se deriva de dietas restrictivas intensas, originadas en buena medida por presiones sociales. Estas dietas tienen como resultado un hambre persistente que, en un momento de pérdida de autocontrol en situaciones como la experimentación de afectos desagradables o estímulos externos, la conducta alimentaria se ve desinhibida [39][40][41][42][43].…”