Palascha submitted a questionnaire to 241 consumers to measure the extent to which they had rigid ideas. She also assessed whether people use dichotomous thinking on food and how their weight fluctuated during the past 5 years. She found that the tendency to restrict food intake was accompanied by higher levels of weight regain. Dichotomous thinking was a key in this positive association. So, it is the combination of restraint eating and dichotomous thinking that may inhibit people from maintaining their weight.
Dichotomous thinkers look at food in terms of good or bad, or all or nothing, says Palascha. If they do not stick to the diet for a moment, then they easily decide that the diet has failed. ‘If it is not perfect and they lose control, they just give up and end up overeating.’ The flexible thinkers do not use a ‘good or false’ scheme in their mind and have a more adaptive dieting behavior, according to the Greek researcher . They can go crazy one night and the next day embrace their diet again. This may be the reason why flexible spirits are more successful with weight maintenance, Palascha concludes in the Journal of Health Psychology.
There has already been done research on people on a diet. Some studies showed that suppressing the eating wish was successful in losing weight, but other research showed precisely that restraining in the long run led to more eating and weight. According to Palascha these differences could be partly explained by the mindset of the consumer.