The appeal of food
Does food lose its appeal in anorexia nervosa?
Many people try to lose weight but most struggle to stick to their diet. This is not true of people with anorexia nervosa who, instead, excel at losing weight. This PhD research study examined differences in the appeal of food between people who have an eating disorder and people who do not.
The results
- Food is a powerful attractor of attention: We wanted to know whether people with anorexia were perhaps very good at focusing their attention away from food. After all, if tasty food is less likely to attract their attention, they will also be less tempted to eat. This assumption was found to be incorrect. In fact, both people with anorexia and unsuccessful dieters were found to pay more attention to food than people who were not actively trying to lose weight.
- Automatic response: During the experiment, we observed automatic responses to pictures of food, once these had become the focus of attention. Do people with anorexia have the same tendency as people without an eating disorder to automatically approach food? In the process, we did find differences between successful and unsuccessful dieters. Anorexia patients almost completely lacked the automatic tendency to approach the pictures of food. Neimeijer: “This could well make it easier for them to persist with their weight-loss behaviour.” Unsuccessful dieters, by contrast, had a stronger automatic tendency to approach food. “This could perhaps explain why they are constantly tempted to eat more than they had planned”, says Neimeijer.
- Happy or sad: Also notable was that the automatic tendency to approach food was particularly strong among unsuccessful dieters when they felt happy. This applied only to this group and not to the non-dieters. In fact, the opposite was true of the non-dieters: they tended to approach the pictures of food more when they felt sad.
Food is apparently so important to both unsuccessful dieters and people with anorexia that it strongly attracts their attention. This may cause disturbed eating behaviour - whether eating too much or too little - to persist.
What do these results mean for practice?
Eating disorders are among the most severe psychiatric disorders. The results of this research study increase our understanding of how eating disorders arise and why relapses occur so frequently following treatment. This enables us to improve treatment.
The research study
The study involved adolescents completing questionnaires and performing tasks on the computer, in which they had to respond to pictures of food. They repeated this after a year and again after three years. Participants included young people with anorexia, people dieting but not successfully losing weight, and a control group that was not dieting at all.
Collaboration
Accare conducted this study in collaboration with the Department of Psychology at the University of Groningen.