Dietary restraint

Chocolate cravings occur regularly in about 45% of American women. Approximately half of these women link their craving temporally to the menstrual cycle, with a significant proportion of cravings reportedly peaking around ovulation or the onset of menstruation. This study aimed to elucidate the correlates of menstrual craving versus non-cyclic craving. Questionnaires assessing the relationships between craving, eating behaviors, attitudes towards weight and shape, and general pathology were completed by 97 women. Menstrual craving was reported by 28.9% (n = 28) and was associated with potentially maladaptive weight- and eating-related behaviors and attitudes, including higher body mass index, elevated dietary restraint, less flexible control over intake, and more guilt associated with the consumption of chocolate. Findings point to potential mechanisms involved in the etiology of menstrual cravings, such as the view of craving as a response to abstinence from high-calorie foods in an attempt to manage cyclically occurring weight fluctuations.► Perimenstrual chocolate craving occurs in about 20% of American women. ► Evidence does not support role of hormonal fluctuations in the etiology of perimenstrual craving. ► Women who crave chocolate perimenstrually report more eating- and weight-related pathology. ► Perimenstrual restriction of high-calorie foods may cause some to crave these foods.

BACKGROUND: The teenage is a period of
acceptance for much negative health behaviour including choice
of food, vegetable and fruit consumption, etc. Several dietary
behaviour have been linked with childhood obesity, including
increased number of meals eaten outside the home, larger portion
sizes of meals at restaurants and fast-food takeaways, and
increased consumption of snacks and soft drinks. The ideations
formed during the mid-adolescence lead to adoption of either
favorable or unfavorable dietary pattern.

Objective: To assess the effects of a “Health-At-Every-Size” (HAES) intervention on eating behaviors and appetite ratings in 144 premenopausal overweight women.Research Methods and Procedures: Women were randomly assigned to one of the 3 groups: HAES group, social support (SS) group, and control group (N = 48 in each group). Interventions were conducted over a 4-month period, and measurements were taken before and after this period. Eating behaviors (cognitive dietary restraint, disinhibition, and susceptibility to hunger) were evaluated by the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire. Appetite ratings (desire to eat, hunger, fullness, and prospective food consumption) were assessed by visual analogue scales before and after a standardized breakfast.Results: More important decreases in susceptibility to hunger and external hunger were observed in the HAES group when compared with the SS group (p = 0.05, for susceptibility to hunger) and the control group (p = 0.02 and p = 0.005, for susceptibility to hunger and external hunger, respectively). In addition, women from the HAES group had more important decreases in postprandial area under the curve for desire to eat (p = 0.02) and hunger (p = 0.04) when compared with the control group. The change in the desire to eat noted in the HAES group was also different from the one observed in SS group (p = 0.02). Women from the HAES group experienced significant weight loss at 4 months (−1.6 ± 2.5 kg, p < 0.0001), which did not differ significantly from the SS and control groups (p = 0.09). An increase in flexible restraint was significantly related to a greater weight loss in both HAES and SS groups (r = −0.39, p < 0.01; and r = −0.37, p < 0.05, respectively). A decrease in habitual susceptibility to disinhibition was also associated with a greater weight loss in HAES and control groups (r = 0.31, p < 0.05; and r = 0.44, p < 0.05, respectively).Discussion: These results suggest that a HAES intervention could have significant effects on eating behaviors and appetite ratings in premenopausal overweight women, when compared with an SS intervention or a control group.

Restrained eaters have repeatedly been found to overeat following a preload, which phenomenon is called the disinhibition effect. Remarkably, the disinhibition effect is only found when the restraint scale (RS) is used, and never when other measures of restraint, like the three-factor eating questionnaire (TFEQ) or the Dutch eating behavior questionnaire (DEBQ) are applied. Recent research has shown that tendency toward overeating appears to be a better predictor of food consumption than dietary restraint. The present study examines the predictive value of preload, tendency toward overeating and dietary restraint. An experiment was carried out with 209 female participants with the aim to evaluate whether the results of the study [Int J Eating Disorders 28 (2000) 333] are robust. In addition to the RS, the TFEQ and DEBQ were used to measure restraint and tendency toward overeating. Again, no disinhibition effect occurred, confirming the results of the previous study. Restraint, as measured by the three questionnaires, was not related to food consumption. In contrast, tendency toward overeating was significantly related to food consumption. Restraint theory&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s contentions that dieting leads to overeating might be valid for only some dieters, namely those with a high tendency toward overeating.

Des travaux récents ont porté sur les difficultés à initier et maintenir les patients dans des démarches structurées d’accompagnement de l’arrêt du tabac. Les préoccupations concernant la prise de poids au cours de cette démarche ont été particulièrement étudiées. L’arrêt est accompagné par une prise de poids et ces préoccupations sont plus fréquentes chez les femmes. Parmi ces patients, beaucoup ne sont pas prêts à faire des efforts pour cesser de fumer. Ils ont également tendance à abandonner les traitements en cours et ont moins de succès dans leur démarche. De nombreuses femmes semblent utiliser la consommation de tabac comme un comportement compensatoire, en plus de conduites alimentaires péjoratives et d’autres comportements compensatoires variés comme les régimes, les jeûnes, les vomissements et les exercices physiques. Afin de les accompagner dans les programmes d’arrêt, il est important d’aborder les difficultés liées à l’image du corps en lien avec l’estime de soi, les comportements alimentaires et la dépendance au tabac. Plusieurs domaines doivent être explorés : les caractéristiques anthropométriques, le niveau de dépendance, les comportements compensatoires, les préoccupations pondérales, le niveau de confiance dans sa capacité à contrôler son poids, les restrictions cognitives et les troubles alimentaires, le niveau de satisfaction vis-à-vis de l’image du corps, l’existence d’autres troubles psychiatriques et la motivation à l’arrêt. Différentes stratégies d’accompagnement sont intégrées à partir de programmes éprouvés dans l’obésité et les troubles alimentaires, et à partir des thérapies cognitives, de l’approche transthéorique et des entretiens motivationnels.Recent attention has been paid to the difficulty in recruiting and retaining patients in smoking cessation programs. Worry about cessation-related weight gain has received substantial attention. Smoking cessation is accompanied by weight gain, and weight gain worries are more frequent among women than men. Many of these patients are unlikely to try to quit smoking. They are also likely to drop out of treatment, less likely to quit successfully or abandon their quit attempts early. Many women seem to use smoking as a “compensatory behaviour” This concerns essentially women, who are engaged in a pattern of unhealthy nutritional practices and compensatory behaviours, including dieting, fasting, purging, and physical exercise. In order to help women in smoking cessation programs, we discuss the need to address body image disturbance itself, in association with self-esteem, eating patterns and smoking dependence. Several domains have to be measured and explored during functional analysis: anthropometrics data, level of dependence, “compensatory” behaviours, weight preoccupations, confidence in the capacity to control weight, cognitive restrictions and eating disorders, level of body-image satisfaction, psychiatric disorders, and motivation for quitting. Different strategies are incorporated from many disorder treatment programs, including the leading evidence-based for obesity and eating disorders, the cognitive therapy, the transtheoretical approach and the motivational interviewing.

Two studies examined restrained and unrestrained eaters&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; implicit and explicit attitudes toward fatness and thinness. Participants completed measures of implicit and explicit attitudes toward fatness and thinness (Studies 1 and 2), and a measure of the internalization of sociocultural attitudes toward thinness (Study 2). Restrained and unrestrained eaters both had strong implicit negative attitudes toward fatness, but restrained eaters had stronger negative explicit attitudes and beliefs about fatness. Explicit attitudes and beliefs were related to the degree of internalization of sociocultural attitudes, and the internalization of sociocultural attitudes partially mediated the relation between dietary restraint and explicit attitudes. These results suggest that most people are aware of societal standards regarding fatness and thinness and have developed negative implicit attitudes toward fatness, but that only some people (in particular, restrained eaters) have internalized these standards and developed negative explicit attitudes toward fatness that they endorse as personal beliefs.

Using the exogenous cueing task, this study examined whether restrained and disinhibited eaters differ in their orientation of attention towards and their difficulty to disengage from high versus low-fat food pictures in a relatively short (500 ms) and a long presentation format (1500 ms). Overall, participants in the 500 ms condition showed a tendency to direct attention away from high-fat food pictures compared to neutral pictures. No differential pattern was evident for the 1500 ms condition. Correlational analysis revealed that ...