Content area
Full Text
The increased interest in cognitive behavioral strategies for the treatment of obesity has concentrated considerable attention on the evaluation of patients' eating behavior, personality traits, and emotional reactivity. The Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ) evaluates some aspects of eating behavior: cognitive restraint (ie, the level of voluntary control of eating); the tendency to lose control of food intake when faced with external cues; mood changes or disruptive events; and susceptibility to feelings of hunger (1). The Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) includes eating- and weight-related subscales and other subscales that more properly explore the psychological traits of patients with eating disorders (2). The EDI was not originally developed for obese persons; it has been observed, however, that the subscales on drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and perfectionism characterize a strict dieter (3). Furthermore, because the EDI detects signs of more general pathologic conditions, some psychopathologic traits associated with obesity might be revealed (4).
In this study, findings from the EDI and TFEQ are compared in a large group of obese patients. From a behavioral point of view, obesity cannot be regarded as a homogeneous disorder (5), so the TFEQ and EDI findings were analyzed by multivariate analysis (6) to highlight all behavioral and psychological aspects of these obese subjects.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The subjects of this study were 250 obese patients (71 men and 179 women) who were not following a reducing diet. Mean age was 37 years (range=18 to 56 years), mean body weight was 123 kg (range=90 to 208 kg) and mean body mass index was 45.3 (range=32 to 83). Eating behavior and psychological traits were assessed using the TFEQ and EDI.
Data from all patients were evaluated by factor analysis, and five factors were extracted by principal component analysis with varimax rotation. The adequacy of variable sampling was examined by Bartlett's test for sphericity. Results were assessed using the standard error of the loadings (a) significantly different from...