Train your brain, think slim!

Anne Roefs, in collaboration with co-applicants Anita Jansen, Chantal Nederkoorn, Katrijn Houben, Gerhard Weiss en Karl Tuyls, received a grant in the STW-NIHC-Philips Research program "Healthy Lifestyle Solutions". On this project a PhD student, a postdoc and a technician will be hired.

Research Summary: The approach many people take to lose weight is to try one diet after the other. However, research has shown that type of diet generally does not matter, but only that you stick to your diet (i.e., achieve a negative energy balance). An effective approach to help people stick to their diet is based on principles of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In this approach, people learn to identify in which situations they are prone to overeat (e.g., certain emotional states). According to this cognitive approach, situations determine what one thinks, and thoughts determine feelings and behaviour. Changing these thoughts changes behaviour. So,in short, people learn to reconsider and re-evaluate their thoughts and feelings in situations in which they consume unhealthy foods. They learn to 'think slim'! The goal of the current project is to transform these principles into an intelligent hardwaresoftware system that learns (1) to identify a user's individual pattern of consumption of unhealthy foods and the associated thoughts, feelings and situations, and (2) to automatically give a user appropriate feedback based on CBT principles, with the aim of altering thoughts and thereby eating behaviour. So, the system should be an automated coach that largely takes over the role of a cognitive-behavioural therapist. The to be developed hardware-software system will consist of a mobile device to collect all relevant user data such as emotional state, food consumption and certain psychophysiological measures (e-collector) and a stationary software program called e-coach to perform more complex calculations and to automatically provide sophisticated, detailed CBT-based feedback to the user. The development of the intelligent hardware-software system consists of several intertwined tasks and, in the spirit of rapid prototyping, aims at delivering successively improved prototypes, ranging from an initial, rather incomplete one, to a final, nearly marketable product.


Losing is winning

So far, obesity has been viewed as a biomedical problem triggered by the environment. And weight gained is not easy to lose again. But one or two people do manage it. Psychologists are studying the characteristics that predict who will and won’t lose weight successfully, and how we can learn to eat less.


Give us a smile and lighten us up: Novel strategies for enhancing body satisfaction

The project aims to develop novel strategies for enhancing body satisfaction. The research will (a) contribute the understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying body dissatisfaction, (b) develop interventions to alleviate body dissatisfaction – a problem experienced by many women, and a key determinant of eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder, (c) challenge the traditional research focus on the issue of prediction (what factors cause body dissatisfaction?) and directly tackle the issue of change (what strategies are effective in improving body satisfaction?), (d) advance theory and practice in the field of body satisfaction by testing strategiesthat target maladaptive automatic processes.