The study, published in Appetite, examined the effect of exposure to subtle images relating to diet and food intake in current dieters and non-dieters - finding that those who are actively dieting are influenced by the imagery while non-dieters are not.
Led by Nicola Buckland from the University of Leeds, UK, the team noted that while long term goals to lose weight often fail in the short term due to hedonic temptations, exposure to diet-congruent food cues remind dieters of their long term diet goals and prompt short term regulation of food intake.
"Dieters reduced energy intake after subtle exposure to diet-congruent images compared to dieters exposed to non-food images. Energy intake for non-dieters did not differ regardless of image cue exposure," revealed the team.
"Such findings suggest that increasing the availability of weight-loss reminders in the eating environment might help dieters to achieve dietary restriction," they added, noting that the majority of dieters were not aware that the images influenced their food intake but such subtle reminders were sufficient to lead to a reduction in energy intake.
Study details
The team set up a between-subjects study involving female dieters (n = 26) and non-dieters (n = 41) in which participants were briefly exposed to diet-congruent or neutral non-food images before a tempting snack.
"Results showed that dieters exposed to diet-congruent images consumed less energy than dieters exposed to control images," said Buckland and her colleagues.
"Interestingly, dieters’ reduced energy intake was driven by a reduction in the low fat sweet food but not the high fat sweet or savoury foods," they added - suggesting that it might be the case that the diet-congruent images were effective to reduce intake of a low fat sweet food but were not potent enough to reduce intake of a highly tempting sweet food.
They added that the mechanism for the effect remains unclear, as data from the lexical decision task showed no differences in reaction times to recognise diet-congruent words.
Source: Appetite
Published online ahead of print, doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2013.10.022
"Resistant reminders. Dieters reduce energy intake after exposure to diet-congruent food images compared to control non-food images"
Authors: Nicola J. Buckland, Graham Finlayson, Rebecca Edge, Marion M. Hetherington