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Focus on looks can foil weight loss

This might be the most ironic reason people eat too much:

A team of researchers at Waginengen University in Netherlands found that paying too much attention to your appearance can impair your ability to tell when you’re full. Specifically, the presence of mirrors as well as the confrontation with the sort of stigmas of beauty found in magazines were found to interfere with important mechanisms for properly assessing how much food to eat.

“When people focus too much on their exterior, they miss key signals of satiety,” said Erica van Herpen, assistant professor at Waginengen University and one of the study’s authors. “That’s a problem.”

The researchers tested two scenarios.

In the first, participants were divided into two separate groups – one of which sat in front of mirrors, so they could see their own faces and bodies, the other of which was not. The participants were then served either a milkshake, which, unknown to them, was either made with full cream, or skimmed milk. When the participants were moved to a room without mirrors, where they were asked to watch videos while seated at desks with bowls of M&Ms, a trend began to emerge: Among the people who had drunk the high-calorie milkshake, those who also had sat in front of a mirror ate considerably more M&Ms.

In the second scenario, participants – half of whom were self-described as being hungry, half of whom were not – were asked to evaluate 10 full-color print advertisements. Half of the group was given original advertisements, which “depicted thin female models and western beauty ideals in general,” while the other half was given the same advertisements but after they had been manipulated to remove the female models.

Yet again, those who had been made aware of their appearance ate more than those who had not. The difference was especially pronounced between those who had said they were full and saw pictures of female models, and those who said they were full and saw model-less ads.

That people were found to respond not only to direct confrontations with their appearance, but also indirect ones, speaks to how powerful the influence can be. The advertisements that propagated a “western beauty ideal,” after all, were found to have a similarly numbing effect on perceptions of satiety as the mirrors did on consumption.

The reason this happens appears to be linked to what the researchers call “attentional resources,” which we use to sense all sorts of things, including how hungry we are. But that attention is limited. Redirecting it away from something like satiety means limiting how aware we our of how much food we need.

Previous studies, including one conducted last year, have shown that other cognitive processes can have a similar effect on food intake.

The takeaway shouldn’t be that when there’s a mirror around or any other thing that triggers thoughts about appearance, people simply respond by eating more.

“The result isn’t immediate,” van Herpen said. “It shows in how they compensate for previous meals.”

That could mean eating too little during lunch after eating too little during breakfast, but it could mean the opposite – continuous overeating, which is especially worrisome.

“When people don’t compensate for overeating, that’s when it really becomes a problem,” she said.

The research raises important questions about cultural tendencies that encourage people to closely monitor not only their weight, but everything else about their appearance, too. This just suggests that in a country facing a battle with obesity, a seemingly constant interest in dieting can be counterproductive.

“You hear all this advice swirling around, especially about dieting, that says something like ‘pay more attention to how you look,’” van Herpen said. “But that’s actually wrong because the very opposite might be true.”

Dec 14, 2014
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