Health Psychology : a Textbook

This chapter covers: ➧ What is obesity? ➧ What causes obesity? ➧ Obesity treatment ➧ Should obesity be treated at all? ➧ What is ...

OBESITY The role of psychological factors in obesity This section explores what obesity is and then examines the role of psychol ...

HOW COMMON IS OBESITY? In the UK the rates of obesity are on the increase. If obesity is defined as a BMI greater than 30, repor ...

WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS WITH OBESITY? Physical problems Obesity has been associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, joint t ...

In addition, Rand and MacGregor (1991) reported that individuals who had lost weight following gastric bypass surgery stated tha ...

Adoptee studies Research has also examined the role of genetics in obesity using adoptees. Such studies compare the adoptees’ we ...

people of similar height. To explain these apparently contradictory findings it has been suggested that obese people may have lo ...

to an industrial and increasingly information-based society. As a simple example, a tele- phone company in the USA has suggested ...

lower levels of activity at baseline were women, the women had children and therefore put on more weight). Unless experimental d ...

embarrassment and stigma and that exercise plays a part in the maintenance of obesity but not in its cause. What effect does exe ...

to assess changes in food intake over the past 50 years. The results from this data- base illustrate that, although overall calo ...

Fig. 15-5 Changes in food intake from the 1950s to the 1990s Fig. 15-6 Changes in calorie consumption and obesity OBESITY AND CO ...

obese overeat because they have excess body fat. Over recent years, research has focused on the eating behaviour of the obese no ...

What does all this research mean? The evidence for the causes of obesity is therefore complex and can be summarized as follows: ...

However, it is now generally accepted that obesity is not simply a behavioural problem and as Brownell and Steen said somewhat o ...

The role of dieting in treating obesity With the exception of the multitude of surgical interventions now available, all obesity ...

Dieting, obesity and health Restraint theory (see Chapter 6) suggests that dieting has negative consequences, and yet the treatm ...

psychological characteristics, such as preoccupation with food and depression, than the surgery group (Halmi et al. 1980). Thus, ...

Surgical treatments of obesity Although there are 21 different surgical procedures for obesity (Kral 1983, 1995), the two most p ...

CORONARY HEART DISEASE (CHD) This section examines what coronary heart disease is and the role of psychology in understanding CH ...