The Mental Snag That Makes It Seem Like Food Is Everywhere, Especially If You ’re Overweight

By guest blogger Stacy Lu If you’re planning to take off weight in the new year and it suddenly seems like food is everywhere – and is especially enticing – that’s probably your mind playing a particularly unhelpful trick on you. Thinking about food, even in terms of trying to avoid it, can actually make it more likely that you’ll notice food in your environment, especially if you’re already overweight or obese. That’s according to a recent study in the International Journal of Obesity that compared how overweight and healthy weight people pay attention to food. Food cues – sights, smells, advertisements and social contexts like parties – are everywhere these days, so understanding why some people find it harder to ignore them could be key to designing weight loss programmes. Suzanne Higgs of the University of Birmingham and her colleagues prompted 43 overweight or obese participants and 49 healthy-weight participants to adopt a “food mindset”, or not, during a computerised task by asking them to memorise a picture of a food item, such as pizza, or a non-food item, such as a spanner. Next, they had to locate as fast as possible the position of a circle (left or right-side of the screen), while ignoring the location of a distractor (a square). On some trials the circle was accompanied by a picture of the memorised food item, but on other trials it was the distractor that was accompanied by this food image.  All the participants found it harder to spot ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition guest blogger Health Source Type: blogs