Is Planning an Aid or an Obstacle? Examining the Role of Consumers' Lay Theories in Weight Loss

Does better planning hold the promise to achieving weight loss? Practitioners and academics often prescribe planning one's diet and exercise as a means of achieving weight loss. However, this study challenges such a prescription. The key insight derived from experience-rich qualitative data with a sample of dieters posits that lay theories, implicit beliefs about the mutability of individuals' selves and abilities, hold the key to understanding how planning operates in the weight-loss process, becoming either an obstacle or an aid for dieters. Findings from this study show that dieters who hold an entity lay theory are more inclined to view planning as an effortful enterprise, further aggravated by survival mentality focused on following simple rules and instructions. Dieters who hold an incremental lay theory, in contrast, view planning as a de-stressing aid. They favor principles that are applicable to a greater variety of situations and strive to cultivate autonomous weight-loss skills and competencies through planning. This research points to the need of rethinking how public health advocates can facilitate more effective weight-loss effort and its sustained benefits. ********** Statistics tell an alarming tale of obesity as a weighty, global problem. Worldwide, an estimated one billion adults are overweight and at least three-hundred million are obese (Abelson and Kennedy 2004). In the United States, as indicated by body mass index (BMI), 68.8% of adults are overweight or obese (Flegal et al. 2010). Despite some improvements in parents' healthy food choices (Hoy and Childers 2012), the obesity rate among American children and adolescents remains at 31.8% (Ogden et al. 2012). Beyond excess weight, obesity is further responsible for a host of diseases that amount to nearly 21% of all health care costs in the United States (Cawley and Meyerhoefer 2012). Perhaps, in part alerted by the dire repercussions of being overweight for consumers' physical, emotional, and social well-being (e.g., Doll, Petersen, and Stewart-Brown 2000), about forty-five million Americans diet each year (Boston Medical Center 2013; http://www.bmc.org) and spend around $50 billion annually on weight loss (Weiss et al. 2006). Yet, a comprehensive review of studies on long-term outcomes of dieting finds that one-third to two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets (Mann et al. 2007). These statistics point to the need to better understand how consumers can successfully lose weight for sustained health benefits. Such improved understanding can hold the key to better public policy, more responsive legislation, and better weight-loss programs. While nutritional knowledge is vital (e.g., Ramezani and Roeder 1995; Stutts et al. 2011), planning also plays an important role in combating obesity. Practitioners and academics alike prescribe planning one's diet and exercise as one of the most effective ways to achieve and sustain weight loss (e.g., Franz et al. 2007; Wing and Phelan 2005). Commercial services such as Weight Watchers (2012) (http://www.weightwatchers.com), as well as dieticians and health care professionals, contend with this prescription and propose that consumers seeking weight loss ought to plan (e.g., Heshka et al. 2003). Scholars also advocate behaviors such as reading food labels as contributors to weight loss (Mandal 2010). These prescriptions tie in with psychological literature, which identifies planning as an antecedent to long-term goal attainment such as weight loss (e.g., Gollwitzer 1996; Sniehotta, Scholz, and Schwarzer 2005). Presumably, planning enables consumers to better envision how they can translate the outcome of weight loss into actions that foster goal attainment. Planning is also supposed to offer consumers an automatic safeguard against relapses created by unwanted obstacles, whether due to factors such as mood, ego depletion, or cravings (Gollwitzer and Sheeran 2009). …