Control of Eating Behavior Using a Novel Feedback System

The overall goal of this medical device is to allow under and overweight patients to eat normally, restoring body weight and improving physical and mental health and to manipulate the rate of eating in healthy subjects for experimental purposes. This method can help us answer key questions concerning the management of body weight problems such as eating disorders and obesity. The main advantage of this method is that it allows the objective measurement of eating behavior and also to change eating behavior for experimental and clinical purposes.

The implications of this technique extend toward therapy of anorexia, bulimia, and obesity because the patients do not know how to eat or how to feel full normally. We first got the idea to develop this method when an anorexic patient said she didn’t know how to eat or how to feel full and she wanted to use the device to learn how to eat. Begin by downloading the application onto the smartphone device.

Then turn on the scale by pressing the red button on the bottom. Open the application and select a meal by pressing either control to eat without visual feedback or pressing training to eat with visual feedback. Next, connect the scale to the smartphone device by selecting one of the scales paired with the device from the list and pressing connect at the bottom.

Place a plate on the scale. Press done in the upper right of the screen to continue. Escort the subject into the testing room and seat them in front of the plate of food and scale.

Point out the smartphone screen and ask them to adapt their rate of eating to the dashed blue reference curve. Inform them that the blue curve will change as more food is eaten off the plate. When the rating scales appear on the screen, instruct the subject to rate their feeling of fullness.

Press save to continue eating. Advise the subject to slow down if they are eating too quickly. When there’s no food left on the plate, press no to confirm they are finished eating.

Finally, note the meal duration on the screen and press done to exit. In a group of five patients who were treated to remission from anorexia nervosa, results indicated an accelerating rate of eating in the first test without visual feedback and intake of a large meal three days later with reference curve providing visual feedback. Device recordings are automatically converted to the cumulative curve of food intake, a quadratic model of eating behavior.

Further, there was a doubling of the rate of eating at the time of remission in comparison with the two recordings in the early part of treatment in one of the patients. The time of remission was variable across the five patients. Patients with a normal body mass index at the time of remission consumed more food than they did at admission and that the duration of the meal although not reduced was less variable.

Lastly, while three patients ate at an accelerating rate at admission, all but one ate at a decelerated rate when in remission. The initial rate of eating had increased at the time of remission. This device is easy to use and has been used by hundreds of eating disorder patients and overweight patients practicing eating at home.

This application has also been used in experiments on healthy subjects to examine the effect of dieting and in naturalistic settings such as school lunches. Patients with eating disorders like using the device. They feel safe and they trust it and they can use it wherever they choose to eat, at home, eating with friends at the school cafeteria, or at restaurants.

This method allows you to control how much you eat by providing support.