Struggling with maintaining your weight loss? Don't let emotions feed you.

Posted on: 29 Apr 2011 | Comments: 0

Author: Karla Reynolds

People tend to eat more when they encounter various celebrations in their lives. These include birthdays, holidays, celebrations with co-workers and just going out every now and then. Whenever these kinds of events occur, we tend to consume more food than we actually need. A recent study discovered that people who eat more in response to various external factors (such as celebrations) are able to lose weight more easily than people who eat more in response to the internal factors, such as emotions. The same study found that this type of people - emotional eaters tend to regain weight more easily after weight loss as well.

The lead authors of the study provide evidence that the more people report eating as a response for their negative emotions (loneliness, sadness, disappointment), the less likely they are to benefit from a behavioral weight loss program. The same group of individuals was also more likely to regain their weight after a temporary weight loss. This is a recurrent problem for the field of overweight and obesity treatments, and remains its one of the greatest challenges. According to authors, behavioral weight loss programs achieve on average a ten percent weight reduction which provides significant health benefits to the participants, but, unfortunately, the majority of them return to their previous weight within three to five years.

In this particular study, the researchers looked at the responses of individuals to a list of questions called Eating Inventory. This list evaluates three aspects of eating behaviors such as hunger, disinhibition and cognitive restraint and is widely used in overweight and obesity research. The study of interest only looked at the disinhibition factor. Despite that the earlier studies have suggested that disinhibition as whole was a relatively accurate predictor of a successfull weight loss, the degree of such disinhibition depended on multiple factors. The researches hypothesized that the degree of disinhibition will help evaluate the impulse eating in response to emotional, social and cognitive cues. Their goal was to examine and separate the factors that constitute the degree of disinhibition, and then understand if these factors correlated with weight loss and weight regain.

Participants in the study were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 286 overweight men and women who were a part of a behavioral weight loss program. The second group was composed of 3,345 members of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), an ongoing study of adults who have lost at least thirty pounds and remained at that weight for at least one year. By studying these two different groups, the authors were able to determine the effect of disinhibition both on individuals trying to lose weight, as well as on those who were maintaining their weight loss. Further examination of the data identified two distinct areas: external and internal disinhibition where external disinhibition refers to external experiences, while internal disinhibition refers to eating in response to thoughts and feelings and includes emotional eating. In both groups, internal disinhibition was a significant predictor of success rate of weight loss over time with the higher levels of internal disinhibition resulting in lesser weight loss over time.

At the end of the study, authors conclude that eating, triggered by thoughts and feelings, should be given more attention, as emotions clearly play a great role in overall success of weight loss. Internal disinhibition, however, predicted weight change over time much more accurately than other psychological events such as binge eating, perceived stress, or depression. Authors suggest that further changes in treatments, addressing emotional triggers, may help fight unhealthy eating and increase chances of a long term weight maintanance for many individuals.

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