My central thesis is that weight management is best understood as an activity of self-regulation. Within self-regulation, there are several important issues: the range of self regulation motivations; the identification and monitoring of target behaviors; the energy costs of self regulation; and self regulation compromise due to competing and conflicting motivations. Within the arena of competing and conflicting motivations, I find the motivation of emotion regulation is one of the most difficult and powerful collision points for our aim at the self-regulation of body weight. 1. In some cases, emotional regulation is a competing motivation: a motivation to regulate that competes for energy with other motivations like weight regulation. This is an important consideration, because for most people the immediacy of the demand for energy to manage the emotional moment often eclipses the demand for energy to manage the longer range concern with weight regulation. So this is important - but in this fight, emotion management only wants energy, not control of food behavior. I hope you can see. 2. In other cases, emotional regulation is a conflicting motivation: a motivation to regulate that competes with another motivation for energy and for the control of specific behavior (this is the case of food dependency, fat dependency, binge eating, compulsive eating, emotional eating in general and food addiction). Here the regulation of weight and the regulation of emotion fight for control of eating behavior in a manner where one wins and the other loses. As we study emotion regulation, we will keep an eye on this both as a conflicting and a competing motivation. The first six articles below are all good reading on our topic. The second selection is frankly far and above all others. It is also, however, exceptionally difficult reading. Please take it on. Please take it in small measures. I have attached a few notes of mine in the first selection. Finally, here is a link to a sort of bible on emotion regulation by James Gross of Standford University. Have a look at the first chapter: http://books.google.com/books?id=Jh81lZKqFH8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false |
