More restriction, more overeating: conflict monitoring ability is impaired by food-thought suppression among restrained
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
More restriction, more overeating: conflict monitoring ability is impaired by food-thought suppression among restrained eaters Xuemeng Zhang 1,2 & Shaorui Wang 1,2 & Yong Liu 1,2 & Hong Chen 1,2 Accepted: 7 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Numerous studies have shown that restrained eating is not an effective weight loss strategy. Restrained eaters often suppress their desires and thoughts about tasty food, which makes it more difficult to control themselves in subsequent eating behavior. The ego depletion impairs conflict monitoring abilities. Therefore, this study explored the effects of food thoughts suppression on restrained eaters’ conflict monitoring. Therefore, this study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to explore changes in the activity of brain regions involved in conflict monitoring when restrained eaters choose between high- and low-calorie foods after either suppressing or not suppressing thoughts about food. The results showed that, compared to the control condition, after suppression of such thoughts, restrained eaters chose more high-calorie foods and displayed decreased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—an important region in charge of conflict monitoring. At the same time, the functional coupling of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the precuneus increased. Our findings suggest that restrained eaters’ suppression of thoughts about tasty food could lead to a decline in their ability to monitor conflicts between current behaviors and goals, which in turn leads to unhealthy eating behavior. Keywords Food-thought suppression . Restrained eating . Conflict monitoring . Food choice . fMRI
Introduction Restrained eating refers to the intentional, sustained restriction of caloric intake to lose or maintain body weight (Herman and Mack 1975) and is a popular weight loss strategy used in particular by overweight or obese women (Lowe 1993; Polivy and Herman 2002). When viewing and consuming high palatability foods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed that restrained eaters compared to unrestrained eaters showed stronger activation in areas implicated in desire, food liking, and reward expectation, such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and insula (Burger and Stice 2011; Coletta et al. 2009; Demos et al. 2011). Furthermore,
Xuemeng Zhang and Shaorui Wang contributed equally to this work. * Hong Chen [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Southwest University, No. 2 Tiansheng road, Beibei district, Chongqing 400715, China
2
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education), Southwest University, Chongqing, China
elevated OFC and insula activity were associated with weight gain over a 3-year follow-up (Stice et al. 2015; Winter et al. 2017). In daily life, restrained eaters consciously control their diet in various ways, such as by suppressing thoughts about tasty food (Van Gucht et al. 2014). Suppressing the idea of tasty food can lead to a
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