“Overeating is a major contributor to obesity, yet most treatments overlook the unconscious habits that drive it,” said Nabil Alshurafa, PhD, associate professor of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and of computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. He is the corresponding author of the study, published this month in NPJ Digital Medicine, part of the Nature portfolio.

For the study, sixty adults with obesity wore the sensors and logged their meal-related mood and context (such as who they were with and what they were doing) through a smartphone app for two weeks. The research generated thousands of hours of data and revealed that overeating falls into five distinct patterns:

  • Take-out feasting: gorging on delivery and take-out meals
  • Evening restaurant reveling: social dinners leading to excess food intake
  • Evening craving: late-night snack compulsion
  • Uncontrolled pleasure eating: spontaneous, joyful binges
  • Stress-driven evening nibbling: anxiety-fueled grazing Athletech News