Motivating Healthy Diet Behaviors: The Self-as-Doer Identity

Abstract

We investigated whether the experimental manipulation of a self-as-doer identity predicted improved healthy food consumption immediately and one month post-intervention. Women (N = 124), 18–53 years old (M = 22.1, SD = 5.8) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (i.e., control, education, or education and self-as-doer activity) and recorded their diets over six weeks. Repeated measures ANCOVAs were performed to determine if the self-as-doer intervention created change in healthy food consumption. Self-as-doer participants ate more healthy foods one month post-intervention than did other participants. Self-as-doer participants maintained overall healthy eating behaviors while education and control participants decreased these behaviors over the six-week period. Findings demonstrate initial evidence of an intervention effect on healthy food consumption and we discuss ways to advance research on the self-as-doer identity construct.

Keywords::

• Self-As-Doer
• Diet
• Self-Identity
• Motivation
• Nutrition

We would like to acknowledge Angie Wendorf and Cami Thomas for their invaluable feedback on the development of the study protocol and the self-as-doer intervention and undergraduate research assistants from the Patient Advocacy and Research Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Health Behavior Research Lab at Winona State University for their support in data collection and data entry. We are also grateful for the Winona State University Foundation for their financial assistance of the project.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.