Many eating disorders exist, such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. The common characteristics of these disorders relate to various psychological conditions that cause unhealthy eating habits, such as obsessions with food, physical appearance, and body weight.

 

The COVID-19 outbreak significantly changed the way I live. Due to strict quarantine policies, I began staying at home and stockpiling food. My long-term sedentary life created boredom or a void, significantly associated with my greater energy consumption. In addition, repetitively listening to and watching the news about the COVID-19 pandemic also created stress and depression for me. Being involved in stressful events can lead people to overeat nonessential foods, especially those “comfort eating foods” characterized as processed, rich in sugar, and contains many carbohydrates. Such foods reduce stress because serotonin is produced and enhances mood (Renzo et al, 2020). Although I am satisfied with the stress reduction caused by consuming a great deal of nonessential food, I also like the feeling of fullness. These senses of satisfaction cause me to engage in the same behavior whenever the prompt appears repetitively. I gained significant weight as a result, which increased my concerns about my physical appearance.

 

Whether an individual performs a behavior depends on the event that occurs before (maintaining antecedents) and after (maintaining consequences) behavior in question (Spiegler, 2016). People tend to engage in a behavior when they have the motivation, knowledge, or resources, which are known as prerequisites. People are also likely to engage in a behavior when stimulated by a prompt or a series of setting events. Maladaptive behaviors are maintained because the consequence serves as a reinforcement, which strengthens the likelihood that the same behavior will be performed in the future. To eliminate maladaptive behavior, a person must identify its antecedents and consequences.

 

As noted, I experienced much stress at home, and I tended to reach for snacks at random points throughout the day to fill up my stomach and reduce my anxiety and stress significantly. This behavior occurred at random times as long as I felt stressed and bored. When I did not consume sufficient food to keep my stomach full while I was under the stress of working and studying, I experienced an attention deficit that prevented me from focusing on my work. I developed and maintained this maladaptive behavior because the consequences of feeling full and satisfied reduced my anxiety and stress and gave me a sense of energy that enabled me to focus on my homework again. The consequences of my random eating behavior serve as positive reinforcements to perform the same behavior in similar situations in the future. Thus, my nearby snack basket, which prompts me to engage in my maladaptive nonessential food intake behavior to curtail my stress and boredom, served as negative reinforcement. As noted above, my target behavior (TB) occurred as an intermittently ratio, which mainly explains long-term behavior maintenance (Speigler, 2016).

 

The measurement began when I landed and underwent quarantine in Shanghai. Due to the restrictive local policy and grim setting and events, I was not allowed to leave my quarantine camp. Because I was exposed to a small, dim, and lonely environment, I was more likely to experience stress and boredom, and because I was allowed to order food delivery through my phone, the daily frequency of my nonessential food intake was reached 10 times a day averagely at baseline level, which directly caused me to gain unwanted weight. Therefore, my phone prompted me to consume food indirectly by continuously ordering food delivery.

 

Various behavior treatments can be used to treat repetitive maladaptive behaviors. My maladaptive target behavior (i.e., deceleration behavior), non-essential food intake, occurs too often each day and needs to be decelerated. Therefore, treatments can be generalized in two ways: direct deceleration by punishing my misbehavior (i.e., aversion therapy) or indirect deceleration by reinforcing an alternative, healthy behavior that can serve the same function. More specifically, decelerating a target behavior by directly changing the maintaining condition would cause an incomplete solution. The problem behavior is stressful, distressing, and annoying but it serves some function and fills time in a person’s life, so the individual would feel a void if the maladaptive behavior were reduced or eliminated directly. In addition, the use of a punitive method to decelerate the individual’s behavior would also create problematic results. Introducing aversion stimuli or associating the target behavior with an unpleasant condition would cause the individual to experience anxiety, stress, or even hostility during the treatment (Domínguez, Vega, & Parga, 2020). In contrast, modifying a maladaptive behavior by substituting an accelerating behavior would elicit a competing response that serves the same function and fill the temporary void with appropriate behavior, so the individual would not have the chance to perform the decelerating behavior (Speigler, 2016).

 

In Australia, Dawson et al. (2021) conducted a study about text message interventions for dietary behaviors for people receiving maintenance hemodialysis. They collected a sample of 130 patients, 48% eligible to participate in the six-month study. With a retention rate of 88% and a 2% withdrawal rate, they found that the group receiving a one-way text message reminder intervention about receiving hemodialysis experienced significant improvements in dietary intake compared with those who did not experience the intervention. The study showed that more intervention participants (93%) adhere to four or more of eight dietary guidelines than usual care participants (73%). According to the report, this efficacy calculation was undermined, meaning that using text messages as prompts to adhere to dietary guidance is far more effective than expected. In other words, the text intervention to alter patients’ food intake behavior was feasible and acceptable. The motivation generated by the text intervention encouraged the participants to complete the daily task. This study illustrated that poor adherence to dietary guidelines could be altered via prompt alternation. Hence, I could use a similar treatment to decelerate my nonessential food intake by increasing my awareness of the altered prompt that elicits my accelerating behavior: accelerating water intake.