Success + Failure Of Dieting Flashcards
Three types of diets
- Restricting the total amount of food eaten
- Refraining from eating certain types of food
- Avoiding eating for long periods of time
Dieting failure - restraint theory
Herman + Mack. The restraint theory suggests that dieting can be successful, resulting in under eating and weight loss because we are successful in restraining our intake of food. However, more often than not, it results in over eating and weight gain and leads to diet failure.
Support for restraint theory + evaluation
Wardle and Beales randomly assigned 27 obese women to a diet, exercise or control group for 7 weeks. Found that participants in the diet group ate more than those in exercise and control group
- high control
- small sample and gender bias
Why according to restraint theory do diets fail?
Restrained eaters have a cognitive boundary for eating. Once the boundary has been crossed they gain a what the hell attitude, they overeat and then diets fail.
Criticisms of restraint theory
Anorexics actively try not to eat and don’t overeat as a result so restraint theory can’t explain duly why diets fail.
Diets may fail due to biological reasons
The boundary model
Herman and Polivy state that psychological factors have the greatest impact on consumption. Diets have a larger gap between hunger and satiety so take longer to feel hungry but need more food to fill up, therefore this need to feel full can result in over eating
The role of denial
Werner told participants not to think about a White bear but to ring their cell when they did, others were told to think about the bear. The ones who were told not to rang their bells most often.
The more a person tries not to think about eating a certain food the more they want to eat it
Success in dieting
Not feeling bored / variety
Support for success of dieting
Redden had participants eat 22 fruit flavoured jelly beans while rating their enjoyment. At the end, participants were asked to indicate how repetitive the eating task felt and how much variety they perceived.
People given specific flavour labels became less voted and fed up and kept enjoying the jellybean a longer than people given the general label of jellybean.
Social media and diet success
Some people lose a lot of weight and are able to sustain it. Could be due to operant conditioning at first - then social support to sustain motivation when weight plateaus
Issues with research into the success and failure of dieting
- subjective self reports
- gender bias
- cultural bias
