Rebound Eating Exists - it's official

alison489
Apr 17
3 min read

Updated: Jun 16

There’s a strong body of evidence showing that rebound eating (or compensatory eating after restriction) is a real and well-documented phenomenon. The longer you have been attempting to exert external control over your appetite, the larger your appetite will have grown. This means that you could be only restraining your eating very mildly and even eating more than your body needs and still be technically "restricting" and therefore creating the rebound eating effect.

Below are some of the most influential studies and concepts that support this idea, spanning both physiological and psychological perspectives.

🔬 Key Studies & Evidence Supporting Rebound Eating

1. The Minnesota Starvation Study (Ancel Keys, 1944–45)

📌 What it was:One of the most famous studies on the effects of semi-starvation, conducted on 36 healthy young men during WWII.

📌 Findings:

After 6 months of caloric restriction (~1,600 calories/day), participants became obsessed with food.
Once allowed to refeed, many engaged in extreme rebound eating, consuming up to 8,000–10,000 calories per day.
Even months into refeeding, they described intense hunger, emotional distress around food and loss of control.

📌 Why it matters:It clearly showed that food restriction can lead to intense preoccupation with food, binge-like behaviours and long-term disregulation of appetite — even in people without a prior history of disordered eating.

2. Polivy & Herman: The Restraint Theory (1985 and beyond)

📌 What it is:A psychological framework explaining how cognitive dieting (restrained eating) increases vulnerability to overeating and bingeing.

📌 Key ideas:

People who diet or restrict are more likely to overeat when they “break” a food rule.
Restriction leads to a disinhibition effect — once the diet is broken, they feel out of control ("I already messed up, so I might as well keep going").
This is often not due to hunger, but rather a mental backlash to the rules.

📌 Supporting studies:They did multiple experiments showing that dieters ate significantly more than non-dieters in lab settings after a perceived dietary violation (e.g., drinking a milkshake before a taste test).

3. Dieting and the Risk of Binge Eating (Stice et al., 1999)

📌 What it found:In a longitudinal study, adolescent girls who reported dieting were at higher risk for developing binge eating behaviors than those who didn’t.

📌 Why it matters:It supports the idea that restriction (even mild) can predict future episodes of loss of control eating — a kind of psychological and behavioural rebound.

4. Leptin & Ghrelin Dysregulation from Restriction

📌 What we know physiologically:

Ghrelin (the hunger hormone) increases with restriction, while leptin (the satiety hormone) decreases.
Chronic dieting or energy deficits lead to persistent hunger, slowed metabolism, and increased drive to eat — especially high-calorie foods.
These biological shifts set the stage for rebound eating once food is available again.

📌 Key studies:

Sumithran et al. (2011) showed that even a year after weight loss, participants had elevated ghrelin levels and reduced satiety hormones, driving increased hunger.

5. Animal Studies on Food Restriction

📌 Findings in rats and other animals:

Animals exposed to periods of food restriction followed by re-feeding often show binge-like behaviour, consuming more than controls.
This mimics human patterns of restriction → binge cycles.

📌 Key researchers:Studies by C.M. Berner and Kelly Klump (2011) explored how intermittent access to palatable food after restriction leads to patterns mimicking binge eating disorder.

🧠 Summary: What the Science Says

Cause	Effect
Caloric restriction	↑ Hunger hormones, food obsession
Cognitive dietary rules	↑ Risk of disinhibition, bingeing
Skipping meals or under-eating	↑ Drive to eat later, especially at night
Food forbiddenness (psychological)	↑ Desire and eventual overconsumption