Within the current obesogenic environment, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has dramatically increased over the past 40 years. As a result, approximately 40% of Americans attest to being on a diet, with most of these efforts being unsuccessful. Most weight loss diets rely on self-control and reflective thinking (e.g., making conscious food choices multiple times per day), despite the fact that responses to appetitive foods often occur through implicit (unconscious) processes. The proposed study is a randomized clinical trial for weight loss that targets these implicit processes through the use of a computerized, food-specific, go/no-go task. This task has previously resulted in reduced food consumption in laboratory settings, and small but significant weight loss in two brief intervention studies. The purpose of this study is to replicate one prior study and to compare different doses of the intervention. Participants will be assigned to one of three groups: high intensity, low intensity, or active control, and will be assessed on a number of variables pre- and post-intervention. Changes in body weight, food evaluation, frequency of self-reported food consumption, and eating disinhibition scores will be evaluated. It is hypothesized that individuals receiving the food-specific go/no-go training (high intensity and low intensity groups) will experience greater weight loss, decreased disinhibition with food, and reduced snacking of the targeted foods than those in the active control group. It is also hypothesized that the high intensity intervention will be more effective than the low intensity intervention across these variables. Moderators (e.g., dietary restraint, disinhibition) will also be explored throughout this study, along with the mechanism of devaluation of specific foods.
The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of a food-specific Go/No-Go (GNG) computerized training task on weight loss, food evaluation, and disinhibition in a population of overweight and obese individuals.