Stay calm and be balanced: Equanimity and eating disorders
Résumé
A growing body of research investigates equanimity as an outcome of mindfulness practices. Equanimity has
been defined as a stable and impartial mental state or trait, regardless of the affective valence of stimuli or
situations (Desbordes et al., 2015) and is linked to the absence of differences to approach or to avoid positive
as well as negative stimuli (Juneau et al., manuscript in preparation). With equanimity, the relationship to
food and to the body could create less extreme reactions and reduce automatic approach and avoidance
impulses.
According to this, equanimity could be a meaningful quality to help prevent eating disorders and obesity. In
order to start investigating this relationship we ran a few correlational studies. After having created and
validated an equanimity questionnaire on general population (EQUA-S, N = 265), we carried out a first online
study on young women (N = 172).
Results show that, following our hypotheses, women with higher equanimity scores had lower scores on the
Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI; Garner, Olmstead, & Polivy, 1983) and the Dutch Eating Behavior
Questionnaire (DEBQ; Strien, Frijters, Bergers, & Defares, 1986), thus the higher one’s equanimity level is,
the lower his risks of developing eating disorders are. Participants also showed more neutral valence
evaluations toward thin and larger bodies and less arousal according to their own subjective evaluation. We
also found a mediation effect of negative affects (PANAS-N ; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) on the
relationship between equanimity and EDI scores, a finding which is in line with well-known eating disorders
risk factors (e.g., Stice, 2001).
Another brief study with adults without eating disorders (N = 52) showed the same results on arousal
evaluation of food stimuli. Thus, people with higher equanimity evaluate the valence of food stimuli as more
neutral than people with lower equanimity.
These results seem promising for perspectives on the prevention of problematic eating behaviors and the
futures studies will be discussed.