Behavioral Impuilsivity And Impulse's Influences On Restratined Eating

As there has been a great increase in the prevalence of obesity all over the world, and society likes thin body-shape more and more, many people try to lose or control weight by dieting. Long term and chronic dieting will develop to restraint eating. Although restrained eaters are highly motivated to restrict their food intake, they exhibit periods of food restriction that are punctuated by disinhibited overeating. The weight will be regained or even raised after a while, so restrained eaters do not appear to be very successful in their dieting attempts.One of the main reasons which lead to difficulty to control eating behavior is impulsivity which means lack behavioral inhibition. Restrained eaters are unable to restrict themselves from eating and this causes chronic overeating. Food also has hedonic values to restrained eaters. And restrained eaters hold more positive implicit attitude towards platable food, has great impulse to food. This impulse will be manifested in behavior. When control resources are depleted behavior is determined by impulse.Impulsivity and impulse are two different concepts. Behavioral impulsivity means lack of ability to inhibit a certain response. Impulse means motivation towards specific stimulus. The past researches have discovered compared to unrestrained eaters, restrained eaters have higher behavioral impulsivity and hold greater impulse to food. But the results are identical due to different measure methods. And these researches are lack the investigation of how these factors influence actual eating behavior of restrained eaters.In this research, experiment one used Concern for Dieting Subscale of Restraint Scale to assess participants'cognitive restraint standard, used Barratt Impulsiveness Scale and Stop Signal Task to assess behavioral impulsivity and used Single-Category Implicit Association Test to assess impulse towards platable food. The results show cognitive restraint standard is negatively related to the success of weight control which means it is hard for restrained eaters to control weight. There is significant difference in impulse towards food between high and low restraint standard groups. The higher the restraint standard is, the greater the impulse towards food is. But there is no difference in behavioral impulsivity between groups. For participants who have difference in success of weight control, there is difference between behavioral impulsivity also defined as inhibitory ability. Those participants who are poorer in weight control have a worse inhibitory ability.experiment two explored how behavioral impulsivity and impulse towards food influenced real food intake, using Stop Signal Task to assess behavioral impulsivity; using Single-Category Implicit Association Test to assess impulse towards platable food, and word remembering task to manipulate cognitive resource. The results show, when cognitive resource is occupied, food intake is more. There is interaction between cognitive resource and impulse. When cognitive resource is high, food intake increases as impulse towards food increase. Behavioral impulsivity can also predict food intake. The higher the impulsivity, the more is food intake.This research comes to these conclusion:(1) restraint standard is negatively related to the success of weight control. (2) the higher the restraint standard, the greater the impulse towards food; impulse's influence on food intake appears when the control; food intake increases as impulse towards food increase. (3) the higher the impulsivity, the more the food intake and the harder to control weight. (4) impulsivity and impulse influence eating behavior a lot. They also has great significance on intervention of eating.