ABSTRACT
This article describes a 10-year longitudinal study of eating attitudes and behaviors. A sample of 509 women and 206 men completed a detailed survey in 1982 while they were in college. The authors contacted participants 10 years later and administered a 2nd questionnaire to assess stability and change in eating behaviors that occurred during the transition to early adulthood. Women in the study had substantial declines in disordered eating behavior as well as increased body satisfaction. However, body dissatisfaction and desires to lose weight remained at relatively high levels. Men, who rarely dieted or had eating problems in college, were prone to weight gain following college, and many of them reported increased dieting or disordered eating. The authors conclude that disordered eating generally tends to decline during the transition to early adulthood. However, body dissatisfaction remains a problem for a substantial segment of the adult population.
Subject(s)
Body Image , Body Weight , Diet, Reducing/psychology , Feeding Behavior , Feeding and Eating Disorders/epidemiology , Adult , Age Factors , Analysis of Variance , Feeding and Eating Disorders/psychology , Female , Follow-Up Studies , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , New England/epidemiology , Regression Analysis , Sex FactorsABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to examine changes in prevalence of dieting behavior and eating disorder symptoms from 1982 to 1992. METHOD: In 1982, 625 women and 276 men participated in a study examining body weight, eating habits, dieting tendencies, and eating disorder symptoms. Ten years later 564 women and 235 men at the same college completed a nearly identical survey. Similar random sampling methods were used for both studies. All respondents were classified into one of five groups (nondieter, dieter, problem dieter, subclinical eating disorder, or eating disorder according to DSM-III-R criteria). RESULTS: On almost all measures there were significant reductions of problematic eating behaviors and disordered attitudes about body, weight, and shape from 1982 to 1992. The estimated prevalence of bulimia nervosa dropped from 7.2% to 5.1% for women and from 1.1% to 0.4% for men. Binge eating, vomiting, diuretic use, and diet pill use also declined for women during this period. Significantly fewer women and men reported chronic dieting in 1992 than in 1982, and there was evidence of improved body image for both sexes. Subjects in 1992 also reported healthier eating habits in terms of dietary intake and meal regularity. Finally, women in 1992 were more likely to be overweight and were, on average, five pounds heavier than their 1982 counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of problematic eating behaviors and eating disorder symptoms appears to be abating. However, they remain a significant problem that affects a substantial segment of this population.
Subject(s)
Body Weight , Diet, Reducing , Feeding and Eating Disorders/epidemiology , Adult , Attitude to Health , Body Height , Female , Humans , Longitudinal Studies , Male , Prevalence , Sex Factors , StudentsABSTRACT
Preloaded and nonpreloaded dieters (restrained eaters) and nondieters (unrestrained eaters) completed a modified version of the Stroop task to measure selective biases in cognitive processing. In two separate studies, a milkshake preload led to increased cognitive interference for body shape words, especially for restrained eaters. There were no differences between restrained and unrestrained eaters in Stroop interference for either common or forbidden food words, whether subjects were preloaded or not. Taken together, these results indicate that chronic dieting is associated with selective processing of body shape words.
