Fullness Boosts Romantic Feelings in Women

In that study, published in Obesity in 2014, the researchers found that the brains of women with a history of dieting responded more dramatically to positive food cues when fed as compared to women who had never dieted or who were now dieting.

A previous study conducted by the same team found that “highly palatable” food rewards such as chocolate cake produced a greater brain response from women with a history of dieting after they had eaten. Women’s responses to romantic gestures are more enthusiastic if her stomach is feeling satisfied, according to a new study.

Writing in the journal Appetite, the researchers suggest that when a woman is hungry her focus is primarily on getting food. But it also reaffirms previously held findings “showing overlapping brain-based responses to sex, drugs and food”, they write.

Dr. Ely, whose research centers around how people experience reward (particularly in terms of what people who are obese or have eating disorders find pleasant or important), told redOrbit via email that this research was part of a larger study designed to investigate how hunger and satiety influenced how dieters responded to highly palatable food cues, such as pizza or ice cream.

Why? Well, for one, foods makes us content, pure and simple “Instead of being anxious and annoyed and irritable when you’re hungry…once we’re sated, then we can get on to better things”, said the study’s author Alice Ely. After fasting for eight hours, the women were hooked up to a fMRI scanner and shown images – some neutral like a bowling ball, and others clearly depicting romance like a couple holding hands.

While both groups’ reward centers responded more to romantic cues when fed, the historical dieters’ neural activity noticeably differed from the non-dieters in one brain region that had also turned up in the earlier food studies.

A version of this post originally ran on the UC San Diego Health Sciences blog.