ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Addictive Disorders
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1584201
This article is part of the Research TopicUltra-Processed Food Addiction: Moving toward Consensus on Mechanisms, Definitions, Assessment, and InterventionView all 6 articles
Six-Year Follow-Up of an Abstinence-Based, Food Addiction Recovery Approach to Weight Management
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Rochester, Rochester, United States
- 2School of Medicine, New York Medical College, Valhalla, Illinois, United States
- 3University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Research shows that the average person has a slightly addictive relationship with food, manifesting two or more symptoms of food addiction, and more than one in eight people have clinically diagnosable food addiction. Meanwhile, obesity and food addiction share some neurological mechanisms and are correlated in the general population. Could an abstinence-based approach to food addiction recovery be a viable long-term weight loss or weight maintenance strategy? The current study presents sixyear retrospective follow-up data from a cohort of participants who started an abstinence-based food addiction recovery program for weight loss in October of 2017. Survey responses from 267 participants were analyzed and compared to baseline selfreported data from six years prior. At six years, 71.8% of participants were maintaining greater than 5% weight loss. There was a statistically significant association between sustained weight loss and both current program membership (p<0.001) and degree of adherence to the abstinence-based food plan (p<0.001). Adherence was associated with weight loss outcomes in a dose-response manner. The average sustained weight loss for current members who followed the program was 13.9%. In spite of the methodological challenges with this type of study, the results do suggest the long-term efficacy of a food addiction recovery approach to weight loss. They also help validate the notion that food addiction may be a significant contributor to the multi-factorial etiology of obesity and indicate the need for further research into the viability of abstinence-based food plans as tools for weight management.
Keywords: Hyperlink, Font: (Default) +Body (Calibri), No underline, Font color: Auto, Ligatures: Standard + Contextual Formatted: Hyperlink, Font: (Default) Times New Roman Hyperlink, Font: (Default) Times New Roman, Pattern: Clear (White) Formatted: Hyperlink
Received: 27 Feb 2025; Accepted: 10 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thompson, Briones and Rabinowitz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Susan Peirce Thompson, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.