Does feeling what you eat change how you eat? Implications of an intervention to promote consciousness of eating experiences

Introduction

This work aims to understand the experience of participating in the Food and Nutrition Education Program workshops with Sensory and Cognitive Exercises (PESC) and measure its impact on eating behavior.

Methods

The PESC consists of four workshops with exercises stimulating perception and reflection on bodily sensations triggered in eating situations. It was developed to promote consciousness of eating experiences in women who reported difficulty in controlling their body weight and who increased over 5% of their body weight in the previous year. This is a mixed-methods study designed as a controlled trial. The intervention group (n = 19) was evaluated before the first workshop (T0) and after the last workshop (T1) and the control group (n = 18), which did not participate in the workshops, was evaluated twice (T0 and T1), with an interval of 3 to 4 weeks. At T0 and T1, it was applied the Intuitive Eating Scale (IES-2) and the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ-R21). In T1, the intervention group also participated in a qualitative interview.

Results

After participating in the PESC, the intervention group showed an increase in the IES-2 total score (95% Confidence Interval = (0.10, 0.39)) and a decrease in the emotional eating scale score (95% Confidence Interval = (-16.03; -3.85)). The interviews' analysis revealed the participants' self-observation process, which led to the perception of their practices, priorities, intentions, eating difficulties, and the connection between these aspects and environmental issues. The following themes were considered: Food management/control, Body dissatisfaction, Reflection/re-signification, and Different ways of being in familiar contexts.

Discussion

The results allow us to infer that, after participating in the PESC, the intention to manage food intake became more effective, less susceptible to oscillations imposed by the external environment, and more supported by internal resources.

Food Consciousness Intervention Improves Interoceptive Sensitivity and Expression of Exteroception in Women

The perception of the body’s internal state (interoception) and the perception and processing of environmental sensory stimuli (exteroception) act together to modulate adaptive behaviour, including eating behaviour, and are related to bodyweight control. This study evaluated the impact of the Food and Nutrition Education Program with Sensory and Cognitive Exercises on interoceptive sensitivity and on the expression of exteroceptive perception in women who experienced difficulty in controlling their body weight. Thirty-seven women were randomized into two groups and evaluated at two moments: before and after the intervention or before and after a 3- to 4-week waiting period. A heartbeat tracking task was used for interoception evaluation. Participants were asked to write a text describing three foods after tasting them for exteroception evaluation. After the intervention, the participants showed an increase in interoceptive sensitivity, and an increase in the expression of exteroceptive stimuli perception through a semantic assessment of their writing related to the tasting experience. In addition, the results point to a possible connection between the mechanisms governing interoception and exteroception. This work brings important contributions to the search for strategies capable of promoting the perception and integration of physiological and environmental stimuli in food consumption.

Dualistic and Trichotomic Approaches in Psychological Enquiry

Abstract. While the trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit has been part of different folk-psychological and contemplative traditions over the millennia, more recently these concepts have ceded to a dualistic approach by which the physical world is distinguished from a more broadly conceptualized mental realm. In the current paper, we propose a renewed trichotomic distinction on the basis of epistemological considerations about the nature of thinking – which we will apply to the question about the “true self” as a paradigmatic case-study. We differentiate between a representational and an immersive type of thinking – a distinction which we argue can help illuminate facets of the (true) self that remain elusive to a dualistic perspective. We sketch a roadmap toward an empirical enquiry of the self on the basis of a trichotomic distinction and discuss implications of this approach for the study of psychological phenomena in more general terms.

The Self in the Periphery

The self is a multifaceted phenomenon that manifests in a complex configuration of character traits, roles, orientations, and other psychological components. The entity that is binding these subcomponents together has mostly eluded systematic enquiry. In an effort to approach this Gestalt-like whole in an empirical manner, we here introduce the concept of the “peripheral self”: the moments of growth and expansion where the current self grows beyond the horizon of already successful mastery. Over the course of 1 year, we have pursued an empirical first-person approach to explore this continuously shifting horizon of self-development. Our main result is a collection of signature qualities—“experiential echoes”—that demarcate the peripheral self as it advances from potentiality to conscious insight. We provide a roadmap for other researchers to follow up on this approach and relate our findings to the still sparse literature on what constitutes the overarching character of the self.

The 'Self' Aspects: the Sense of the Existence, Identification, and Location

The present article is limited to research studies focused on understanding the phenomenon and construction of the concept of 'Self.' When we look at one's experience of the Self, as a whole, it involves various components associated with different aspects like self-identification, self-location and the sense of the existence of oneself or the sense of Self. While exploring the Self phenomenon, many scientific studies consider only partial aspects of the experience, and hence any understanding resulting from such an evaluation makes it difficult to comment on the nature of the Self. We emphasize that while studying the Self, to understand it totally, one would need to include all the components of the Self. In this connection, we raise the following two theses: a) Ontologically, the Self is conceived as a sentient entity, the bearer of the "what it is like to be" type of feeling, and b) Phenomenologically, we do not have a direct apprehension of the Self, but experience various aspects of the Self through the Senses of Existence, Identification, and Location.

Introspection in Psychology

Abstract. Memory is typically conceptualized as a mental space where information is stored until it is retrieved for current processing. This archive account has been undermined by a multitude of findings, however, calling for a theoretical and also a methodological reorientation. In particular, we consider it timely to include an introspective mode of research into the study of memory because such introspective enquiry can provide insights into the recall process that go beyond those of third-person research. The limitations often associated with introspection (e.g., its seemingly subjective quality and its post hoc nature) are well justified – but only as long as the more immature impromptu introspections are concerned. A more systematically developed form of introspection can overcome these limitations. Such a systematic approach is outlined and used here to develop a taxonomy of mental processes involved in recall. Our observations lend support to a reconstruction account and allow for a differentiation of mental activities involved in various types of recall.