Yesterday I ate 200 g of speck and 13 small slices of pizza, even though I actually didn't want to eat speck any more — it was lying there. In lab studies, mostly with normal-weight female students, people who restrain their eating ate more, not less, after a supposed diet slip, and merely believing they had overeaten could be enough. Polivy and Herman call it the what-the-hell effect — why it happens is disputed. Proximity has been studied too: if a snack is further away, less of it gets eaten — a 2019 Cochrane review finds a moderate effect with low certainty of evidence, mostly from lab studies. And in a six-week study (Martin et al. 2025, manufacturer-funded), tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro, lowered hunger, cravings and the response to food cues in the environment on average, but not conscious efforts to limit eating.
Sources
- Polivy J, Herman CP. Overeating in Restrained and Unrestrained Eaters. Frontiers in Nutrition 2020. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Hollands GJ et al. Altering the availability or proximity of food, alcohol, and tobacco products to change their selection and consumption. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2019. doi.org
- Martin CK et al. Tirzepatide on ingestive behavior in adults with overweight or obesity: a randomized 6-week phase 1 trial. Nature Medicine 2025. nature.com