A systematic review of ecological momentary assessment studies of appetite and affect in the experience of temptations and lapses during weight loss dieting.

Dietary temptations and lapses challenge control over eating and act as barriers toward successful weight loss. These are difficult to assess in laboratory settings or with retrospective measures as they occur momentarily and driven by the current environment. A better understanding of how these experiences unfold within real-world dieting attempts could help inform strategies to increase the capacity to cope with the changes in appetitive and affective factors that surround these experiences. We performed a narrative synthesis on the empirical evidence of appetitive and affective outcomes measured using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) during dieting in individuals with obesity and their association with dietary temptations and lapses. A search of three databases (Scopus, Medline, and PsycInfo) identified 10 studies. Within-person changes in appetite and affect accompany temptations and lapses and are observable in the moments precipitating a lapse. Lapsing in response to these may be mediated through the strength of a temptation. Negative abstinence-violation effects occur following a lapse, which negatively impact self-attitudes. Engagement in coping strategies during temptations is effective for preventing lapses. These findings indicate that monitoring changes in sensations during dieting could help identify the crucial moments when coping strategies are most effective for aiding with dietary adherence.

The Restrain Food Database: validation of an open-source database of foods that should be eaten more or less as part of a healthy diet.

Studies of food-related behaviours often involve measuring responses to pictorial stimuli of foods. Creating these can be burdensome, requiring a significant commitment of time, and with sharing of images for future research constrained by legal copyright restrictions. The Restrain Food Database is an open-source database of 626 images of foods that are categorized as those people could eat more or less of as part of a healthy diet. This paper describes the database and details how to navigate it using our purpose-built R Shiny tool and a pre-registered online validation of a sample of images. A total of 2150 participants provided appetitive ratings, perceptions of nutritional content and ratings of image quality for images from the database. We found support for differences between Food Category on appetitive ratings which were also moderated by state hunger ratings. Findings relating to individual differences in appetite ratings as well as differences between BMI weight categories are also reported. Our findings validate the food categorization in the Restrain Food Database and provide descriptive information for individual images within this investigation. This database should ease the burden of selecting and creating appropriate images for future studies.