The Cognition of Hunger and Eating Behaviours.

Hunger is a poorly defined cognition, assumed to motivate overeating, but there is no firm evidence that the intensity of a sense of hunger is related to overweight. Recent research has suggested instead that irregular eating habits, as deriving from dieting, emotional stressors or other causes may have a role in the weight gain of obese people. These "borderline eating behaviours" (or BEB), targeted in cognitive behavioural therapy of obesity, were found associated to the body mass index both in normal and in overweight subjects in previous studies, using a specific scale called SENICAL. This study aimed at exploring the role of the sense of "unbearable hunger" on these eating irregularities, as measured with SENICAL, which provides an overall measure of BEB. SENICAL has been administered to a sample of 365 university students, together with other self-report measures; one item of SENICAL has been used to measure the frequency of the feeling of "unbearable hunger". An ANCOVA performed on the total SENICAL scores showed a linear increase of BEB along with the frequency of perceived "unbearable hunger", independently form age and gender. An item analysis of the SENICAL scale, performed with Chi square, showed that 15 out of 27 of these behavioural and emotional responses comprising the scale were associated with the sense of hunger, such as to diet or try to fast, to eat at irregular times, to eat more than usual when in emotional state, to eat quickly and not to taste the food, and to worry about weight increase. The "sense of hunger" may contribute to disrupt the eating habits, and maintain many of the eating irregularities associated to weight gain called "borderline eating behaviours". These results suggest that the cognition of hunger is worth to be targeted in the treatment of obese people.