Calorie deprivation impairs the self-control of eating, but not of other behaviors

Abstract

Objective

Sustained weight loss is difficult to achieve, and weight regain is common due to biological and psychological changes caused by calorie deprivation. These changes are thought to undermine weight loss efforts by making self-control more difficult. However, there is a lack of evidence showing a causal relationship between calorie deprivation and behavioral self-control.

Design

In this longitudinal field experiment, we tested whether a ten-day period of calorie deprivation leads to the impairment of behavioral self-control. Participants were randomly assigned to either restrict their calorie intake or to continue eating normally for the study period.

Main Outcome Measures

Participants were given a box of food and non-food ‘treats’ (i.e., chocolates and lottery tickets) that they were asked to resist until the end of the study. On the last day, researchers recorded the number of treats that remained for each participant.

Results

Nonparametric permutation tests revealed that calorie-deprived participants ate significantly more chocolates than control participants did (p = 0.036), but that participants did not differ in the number of lottery tickets ‘scratched’ by condition (p = 0.332).

Conclusion

This pattern of findings suggests that calorie deprivation impairs food-related self-control, but that this self-control deficit may not generalize beyond food-related tasks.

Keywords:

• Calorie deprivation
• calorie restriction
• self-control
• eating behavior

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. (CON-75851). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors want to acknowledge Dr. Nathaniel Helwig, who provided helpful guidance and consulting on the nonparametric analyses. In addition, the authors want to acknowledge the hard work of the many undergraduate research assistants who collected data for this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Funding

This work was supported by the Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Minnesota. The funding source was not involved in study design, data collection, data analysis, or in any other aspect of this project.

Author contributions

T.M. conceived of the original study idea, secured funding, pre-registered the study, assisted with training of research assistants and data collection, supervised E.C.S. throughout, and provided substantive edits to the manuscript. T.M. and E.C.S. developed the study design. E.C.S. created study materials and scripts, trained research assistants, oversaw data collection, analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. Both authors have approved the final article.

Data availability statement

Study data and analysis scripts are publicly available on Open Science Framework at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MZ86D.

Notes

1 All hypotheses, materials, and protocol details were pre-registered via Open Science Framework at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MZ86D. This work was conducted in conjunction with collaborators focused on measuring cognitive processing of images during the calorie deprivation period. Relevant hypotheses for the current study are numbered 4 and 5 in the pre-registration document.

2 We determined that a 31% reduction of TEE approximates recommendations from the American Dietetic Association Guidelines for weight loss (i.e., reducing 500–1000 calories per day for a loss of 1–2 pounds per week; Seagle et al., 2009). We calculated the % TEE that this level of calorie reduction represented across a variety of possible TEE levels, and 31% was the midpoint of these percentages. For safety, we did not assign calorie goals below 1200 calories/day.