This study was a phenomenological investigation of the experience of the urge to eat when not hungry. There were four subjects, two men and two women, of varying ages who were chosen without regard to weight
Data collection consisted of written descriptions from each of the subjects and taped interviews in which they were asked to describe, in detail, an experience of the urge to eat when not hungry. Data analysis, following an empirical phenomenological methodology, resulted in the formulation of a general structure of the phenomenon. This general structure presented the essential psychological constituents of the phenomenon and their interrelationships as they applied beyond the situated experiences of each individual subject
Results showed that the urge to eat when not hungry arose out of a context in which eating was already planned and anticipated. Subjects arrived at this moment desiring a certain world transformation, a transformation that was expected to come about through eating. What and how subjects desired to eat related to the special individual meanings of the food and situation, meanings which included familial roles, life projects, and personal principles. However, these meanings and how they related to both eating and not eating were not univocal. As ambiguities arose in what eating meant, subjects' experience of their own agency fluctuated and so did their concept of self. Thus, a conflict was lived out in which desires alternated, and the experience of being in control of eating also changed. The body was experienced as the vehicle through which relevant projects at hand were lived out through eating, and therefore, when subjects felt full varied in relation to the completeness or incompleteness of relevant projects
Results were dialogued with Schacter's theory of the salience of external food cues, psychoanalytic and post-Freudian understandings of the relation between eating and personality structure, and Santelli's phenomenological research on compulsive eating
