Commentary on: “What is restrained eating and how do we identify it?”: Unveiling the elephant in the room

Abstract

This paper is a commentary on Polivy, Herman and Mills' (2020) article, entitled “What is restrained eating and how do we identify it?”. Polivy et al.’s paper makes a useful contribution by providing guidelines to researchers for choosing the most appropriate measure of restraint for their research questions. However, the authors assume that restrained eating can be appropriately conceptualized as a trait, an assumption I question. They also assume that restrained eating has a causal influence on the outcomes (e.g., counterregulatory eating, negative affect eating, binge eating) with which it has been associated, which I also question. Finally, they ignored a second prominent model for conceptualizing dieting behavior, the Three-Factor Model of Dieting. The Three-Factor Model decomposes the construct of restrained eating into two types of dieting (current weight loss dieting and weight suppression) that do appear to be causally related to eating control and one type (restrained eating to avoid excessive consumption) that modulates likelihood of overeating but does not cause it. I conclude by noting that scientific progress is best served by promoting, not avoiding, discussion and debate about a multiplicity of perspectives on topics of interest, especially when incompatible hypotheses and data exist on such topics.