Foreword
The study of eating covers a range of areas from food choice to weight
concern and eating-related problems such as obesity and eating disorders,
and a range of fields from social sciences including sociology, psychology,
and nutrition to physical and medical sciences such as physiology, psychia-
try, and medicine. My own work has concentrated on factors influencing
eating behavior, especially dieting and its place in the etiology and treat-
ment of eating disorders and obesity. Obesity has long been decried as a
serious medical disorder. For example, a government-sponsored conference
in the United States in the early 1980s concluded that anyone who was as
little as 5 lbs. heavier than “ideal” weight should be considered to be obese.
It was recommended that anyone suffering from such “obesity” should be
aggressively treated with calorie-restricted diets. Many in the medical pro-
fession have long seen obesity as the primary health threat facing Western
societies (and their definition of obesity, as the US National Institutes of
Health conference indicates, includes more than half of the adult popula-
tion). Obesity has been accused of causing heart disease, diabetes, elevated
blood pressure, and a whole host of other medical maladies that may
contribute to elevated mortality. More ominously, the incidence of obesity
has been rising steadily since the 1960s. Dieting, then, seems on the face
of it to be a solution to a widespread health threat.
What those condemning the harmful effects of obesity often fail to notice
is the strong association between overweight and repeated, often chronic,
attempts at weight loss through caloric restriction, or dieting. Approximately
30 years ago, I attended a scientific conference focused on eating behavior
and obesity. I presented my newly published research on what appeared
to be paradoxical overeating in restrained eaters (or chronic dieters), and
suggested that weight loss dieting not only might fail to be helpful to obese
patients, but also could actually be harmful. A doctor in the audience jumped