Can Mindfulness Address Maladaptive Eating Behaviors? Why Traditional Diet Plans Fail and How New Mechanistic Insights May Lead to Novel Interventions.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2018 Judson A Brewer, Andrea Ruf, Ariel L Beccia et al. 83 citations
Modern food environments interact with human biology to promote reward-related eating through associative learning, specifically operant conditioning. Standard weight-loss diets that rely on dietary restriction have shown little long-term benefit and may be counterproductive because they do not directly target the habit-based reward-related eating cultivated by positive and negative reinforcement. Mindfulness training that targets reward-based learning may help rewire the eating process. Teaching patients to act on intrinsic rewards—such as enjoying healthy eating, not overeating, and self-compassion—rather than extrinsic rewards like weighing oneself, offers a promising new direction for improving individuals' relationship with food.