Behavior Modification and Weight Loss

The behavior targeted for control is overeating. The behavior targeted for increase therefore consists of positive eating habits. For the present purposes, overeating is defined as eating in excess of the amount required for healthy living such that one's weight is greater than desired. In this instance, the individual is habitually 10 to l5 pounds over her "ideal" weight, a condition classifiable as "mild obesity."

Behavior modification programs for weight loss are most use-ful for individuals who are mildly obese (Foreyt, 1987). Such

programs are more than diets because they emphasize long-term improvements in eating and often in exercise behavior (Hoerr, Nelson & Essex-Sorlie, 1988; Johnson & Corrigan, 1987). They have the d

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is to diet, it would seem, the children must eat no cookies. More-over, shopping and eating out raise great difficulties for the control of stimuli associated with eating. The present program attempts to circumvent those difficulties by altering the home environment and by placing certain restric-tions on the kinds of restaurants considered permissible under its terms. In other words, the program attempts to achieve stimulus control through providing clearly discriminable stimulus condi-tions for proper and improper eating, rather than by attempting to remove non-dietary foods completely. Such discrimination learning constitutes stimulus control by definition (Rachlin, 1978). It is necessary to compromise between the demands of the real environ-ment and the purity of laboratory conditions. Furthermore, eating habits learned in an environment controlled in a completely artificial way could not survive the official limits of the diet. The kitchen will be arranged in superficial ways so that foods for other family members, particularly snack foods, will be placed in unfamiliar locations. The purpose of this manipulation is not to fool the dieter, but to create an environment that clearly defines the stimuli associated with perm
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2124
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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