People Who Have Complex
Diets Will Abandon Them Faster
The more complex a person's diet plan, the sooner the person will
abandon it, a new study finds.
The finding came from a study of 390 German women who were using
one of two diet plans. The simpler plan provided shopping lists
for dieters and a meal plan they were to follow. The more complex
plan assigned point values to every food and instructed participants
to eat only a certain number of points each day.
The women completed questionnaires over an eight-week span.
"For people on a more complex diet that involves keeping
track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression
of the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it,"
Peter Todd, a professor in the department of psychological and
brain sciences at Indiana University, said in a university news
release.
The effect endured even after the researchers accounted for the
influence of significant social-cognitive factors such as self-efficacy
-- people's belief that they're capable of achieving a goal, such
as adhering to a diet regimen to lose weight.
"Even if you think you can succeed, thinking that the diet
is too cognitively complex can undermine your efforts," the
study's co-author, Jutta Mata, a psychology professor at Stanford
University, explained in the news release.
The study was published online in Appetite.
Mata suggested that people considering going on a diet should
look at a number of diet plans and consider how many rules a plan
has and how many things a dieter needs to keep in mind while using
the plan.
"If they decide to go with a more complex diet, which could
be more attractive, for instance, if it allows more flexibility,
they should evaluate how difficult they find doing the calculations
and monitoring their consumption," she said. "If they
find it very difficult, the likelihood that they will prematurely
give up the diet is higher, and they should try to find a different
plan."
January 20, 2010
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