Impulsive Eating

Most of us have heard and believe that impulsive eating contributes mightily to poor food choices, but that commonsense belief has suffered from a relative absence of careful psychological research.  To remedy the deficiency, Harm Veling and his colleagues (2017) took on the challenge in a series of five experiments.  The tedious details of the five need not occupy us here.  Rather, let’s focus on the experiments’ basic formats and their essential conclusions.

First, the researchers demonstrated that experimental conditions can be created to mimic food choices in the natural environment.  Having established that proof, they determined the subjects’ healthful and unhealthful food preferences.  Subsequently, experimental conditions were manipulated to induce particular food choices.  As anticipated, the participants did make the food choices to which they had been conditioned within the experiment.  However, that induced selection only occurred under time pressure; that is, when the selection needed to be made impulsively.  If the participants were given time to select, were instructed to think carefully about their choices, or needed to carefully attend to their available choices, they made their usual food selections, rather than the choices for which they had been conditioned.

Harm Veling’s subjects were nutrition savvy enough to discriminate the more nutritionally healthful from the less nutritionally healthful foods presented to them during the experiment.  However, in everyday life, sometimes correct food choices are far from obvious.  The food industry spends millions trying to nudge and/or deceive you toward the most profitable products with little or no attention to their health implications.  And, as I am sure you know, most advertising money is spent on foodstuffs that you would prefer to avoid.  If most people wanted the non-healthful foods, very little if any ads would be devoted to them.   

Lesson one from the Veling et al. study then, is to know what is good, better, best, and bad, worse, worst to eat.  To do so, you must take the time and expend the effort to educate yourself accordingly.  Second, try strenuously to make deliberate, rather than impulsive food choices.  Third, since we all eat impulsively at times, know the conditions that do prompt your impulsive eating and avoid them to the extent possible.  Third, give yourself time to select what you want to eat.  Even if you find yourself in a situation that encourages impulsive eating, decide which food choices are better than others.  Fourth, cue yourself to think about the choices.  That could amount literally to saying aloud, “Which of these available foods are best for me?”  Fifth, pay attention to all that transpires; that means, you must pay attention to what you are thinking, feeling, and doing, and what the environment is suggesting to you.  For instance, food presentation can seduce you into eating what looks the best, instead of what is the best.  Finally, and most important: condition yourself to pay proper attention to what you eat and how you eat it.  Conditioning also takes time and effort.  You must start now and continue relentlessly.  Eventually, your default food choices will become much more healthful than they are presently.

Reference

Veling, Harm; Chen, Zhang; Tombrock, Merel C.; Verpaalen, Iris A. M.; Schmitz, & Laura I.; Dijksterhuis, Ap; Holland, Rob W.  Training Impulsive Choices for Healthy and Sustainable Food.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, February 2, No Pagination Specified.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xap0000112