Exposure to Promote Healthy Eating

Adopting a healthier lifestyle includes replacing long-standing unhealthy eating habits with new healthier ones and maintaining these newly acquired healthy eating habits. A permanent behavior change appears to be difficult to maintain, which may follow from some basic learning processes. In the last decades, a lot was learned about the learning mechanisms that promote relapse into old behaviours. Taking these learning processes into consideration, a new exposure intervention was developed to combat several forms of unhealthy eating. Exposure is a powerful strategy to change behaviours and cognitions. This theoretical article briefly discusses some fundamental learning processes that may be involved in unhealthy eating habits and shows how the exposure intervention can be applied to promote healthier eating and long-term behavioral change at all ages.