Networks of stress, affect and eating behaviour: anticipated stress coping predicts goal-congruent eating in young adults

Abstract

Background Many people aim to eat healthily. Yet, affluent food environments encourage consumption of energy dense and nutrient-poor foods, making it difficult to accomplish individual goals such as maintaining a healthy diet and weight. Moreover, goal-congruent eating might be influenced by affects, stress and intense food cravings and might also impinge on these in turn. Directionality and interrelations of these variables are currently unclear, which impedes targeted intervention. Psychological network models offer an exploratory approach that might be helpful to identify unique associations between numerous variables as well as their directionality when based on longitudinal time-series data. Methods Across 14 days, 84 diet-interested participants (age range: 18–38 years, 85.7% female, mostly recruited via universities) reported their momentary states as well as retrospective eating episodes four times a day. We used multilevel vector autoregressive network models based on ecological momentary assessment data of momentary affects, perceived stress and stress coping, hunger, food craving as well as goal-congruent eating behaviour. Results Neither of the momentary measures of stress (experience of stress or stress coping), momentary affects or craving uniquely predicted goal-congruent eating. Yet, temporal effects indicated that higher anticipated stress coping predicted subsequent goal-congruent eating. Thus, the more confident participants were in their coping with upcoming challenges, the more they ate in line with their goals. Conclusion Most eating behaviour interventions focus on hunger and craving alongside negative and positive affect, thereby overlooking additional important variables like stress coping. Furthermore, self-regulation of eating behaviours seems to be represented by how much someone perceives a particular eating episode as matching their individual eating goal. To conclude, stress coping might be a potential novel intervention target for eating related Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions in the context of intensive longitudinal assessment.

Clustering individuals’ temporal patterns of affective states, hunger, and food craving by latent class vector-autoregression

“…Individuals were recruited for the RCT through study announcements via e-mail at several universities in Austria and Germany, Facebook groups, Twitter, and by word of mouth. Similar to previous study inclusion criteria (13), agreeing to one of the following two questions enabled individuals to take part in the study: 1) 'Do you currently pay attention to your nutrition to maintain or reduce your body weight'? and 2) 'Do you currently cut down on your food intake to maintain or reduce your body weight'?…”

“…The temporal network structure is estimated by considering all variables of interest and their unique lagged associations among each other (26). A network analysis study by our group found that higher anticipated stress coping preceded higher goal-congruent eating (13).…”

“…Each time, they were asked to rate their momentary affects, stress (coping), hunger as well as food craving -among other things that are not relevant for the present study -on a horizontal, continuous rating slider from 0 (= not at all) to 100 (= very much). Items used in this study have also been used in previous studies (13):…”

“…Therefore, eating can be viewed as a result of interactions between physiological, affective, and psychological variables. Central non-homeostatic variables influencing eating behaviours include food cravings (9), positive and negative emotions (10) as well as perceived stress (11) / stress coping (12,13), among others. Given both the importance as well as the complexity of eating behaviours, several approaches within psychological research were developed to assess the nature and direction of associations between eating behaviour and affective states (hereinafter used as an umbrella term for emotions as well as experiencing and coping with stress (14)).…”

The Changing Intention to Practice Healthy Eating Behaviour Among Late Adolescents During Covid-19

“…There are several previous studies on eating behaviour (Kolanowski & Trafialek, 2021;Korinth, Schiess & Westenhoefer, 2010;Pannicke, Kaiser, Reichenberger & Blechert, 2021;Scaglioni, Salvioni & Galimberti, 2008;Wardle, Marsland, Sheikh, Quinn, Fedoroff & Ogden, 1992;Webber, Hill, Saxton, Van Jaarsveld & Wardle, 2009). However, there are limited studies on the intention to practice healthy eating behaviour (e.g.…”