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Psychological Research on Attempts to Lose Weight Essays

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Psychological research on attempts to lose weight have led to the derivation of notions such as set-point theory, the externality hypothesis and the restrained eating hypothesis, each of which imply that not only are most of these attempts detrimental to ones health, but are also rather futile and may even result in the opposite of the desired effects occurring.

Obesity is most common amongst people living in Western society, with evidence suggesting that about 24% of men and 27% of women in the United States being regarded as thus (Williamson, 1995). It therefore comes as no surprise that an estimated 24% of men and 40% of women are dieting at any one time (Brownell & Rodin, 1994). However, even though it appears that we are aware of …show more content…

The dual-centres model of hunger (Valenstein, 1973; Winn, 1995), which proposed the idea that there were two specific centres in the brain, the lateral hypothalamus, and the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, of which decreased the experience of hunger (Anand & Brobeck, 1951) and increased the experience of hunger (Brobeck, Tepperman, & Long, 1943) respectively, was discredited with the discovery of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus. The paraventricular nucleus was found to stimulate eating after it had been injected with various neurotransmitters (Leibowitz, 1992). This new observation led to further studies, which have since focused more on neural circuits, for accumulating evidence suggests that the hypothalamus contains interacting systems, which regulate eating by monitoring many different physiological processes.

Glucose is a simple sugar that is an important source of energy (Weiten, 2001); the glucostatic theory proposes that hunger is regulated by the rise and fall of blood glucose levels (Mayer, 1955, 1968). Experiments in the manipulation of glucose levels found that a decrease in blood glucose increased hunger, and an increase in blood glucose levels decreased hunger. Mayer's theory also proposes that the fluctuation in blood glucose levels were monitored in the brain by glucostats, which are neurones that are sensitive to glucose in the surrounding fluid. The

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