Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

Motivational Interviewing Flunks a Test with Pediatricians

February 2, 2024 — Motivational interviewing is a respected tool for helping people who are seeking care for obesity. It’s  all about listening  to and supporting a person’s motivations wanting medical obesity care. But yet again, we are learning that motivation is not the magic answer for overcoming obesity. This time, in Pediatrics, Ken Resnicow and colleagues have published […]

The COVID State of Mental Health: Languishing?

April 20, 2021 — Perhaps you know this feeling: muddling, struggling, dragging. Neither depressed nor flourishing. After a year of this pandemic, many people find themselves in this COVID state of mind. In fact, a global study of mental health in the pandemic lockdown by Andrew Gloster et al found that fully half of the people studied had only […]

What Will We Resolve This Year?

January 7, 2020 — Right now, all we want is a bit of normalcy. Let’s face it, the month of December thrusts a great deal of change and disruption upon us. Maybe it’s the disruption of too much fun and camaraderie. Maybe it’s an excess of familial joy. Or perhaps it’s darker memories that you’re carrying into the new […]

Vegetarian: Reason, Politics, and Personality

September 15, 2017 — Does everything have to be about politics? Can’t we just have convivial meals and enjoy the food? Maybe it does and maybe we can’t. So says a growing body of research on motivations for a plant-based style of eating. Openness, Political Interests, Conservativeness, and Conscientiousness Tamara Pfeiler and Boris Egloff describe how these personality traits […]

Does Obesity Mess with Your Brain’s Reward Center?

August 14, 2017 — For several years now, neuroscientists have been looking for connections between obesity and how our brains process rewards. Dopamine receptors play a role in the reward you feel when you eat especially tasty foods. And prior research suggests people with obesity have fewer dopamine receptors. Now new research in Obesity shows that young adults with […]

Three Articles of Faith in Obesity

August 26, 2016 — Faith – defined as an enduring belief in something that cannot be directly observed or proven – has played an undeniable role in human history that continues to this day. In the face of uncertainty or incomplete answers, we instinctively fall back on ideas that provide meaning and direction as we search for truth. And so it is that […]