Chapter 33 — Self-Check Quiz

20 questions. Answers with explanations at the end. Aim for 16+.

🚪 ⚠️ Threshold chapter. Questions 1, 7, 8 and 20 are the ones that test whether it landed.

Questions

1. 🚪 The threshold concept of this chapter is:

• a) Calories are all that matter
• b) Hunger is two systems — homeostatic and hedonic — and most diets fight the wrong one
• c) Willpower is a finite resource
• d) Emotional eating is the main cause of overeating

2. The homeostatic system is best described as:

• a) A moral faculty
• b) The body's energy-regulation system — stores, need signals, satiation and satiety
• c) A response to palatability
• d) A learned habit

3. Satiation and satiety differ in that:

• a) They are synonyms
• b) Satiation ends the current meal; satiety delays the next one
• c) Satiation is psychological, satiety physiological
• d) Only satiety involves the stomach

4. After weight loss, the largest and most durable change is in:

• a) Metabolic rate
• b) Appetite — ghrelin rises, satiety hormones fall, and it persists a year or more
• c) Muscle mass
• d) Body temperature

5. WANTING and LIKING:

• a) Are the same thing measured two ways
• b) Have different neural substrates and can come apart — high wanting with modest liking is common
• c) Always rise together
• d) Are both purely psychological

6. Which is NOT a driver of wanting in §33.2?

• a) Cues
• b) Palatability
• c) Variety
• d) Energy need

7. 🚪 Applying "just eat less" to cue-driven eating:

• a) Works slowly
• b) Fails, and makes it worse — it degrades energy status, which increases reward responsiveness
• c) Works if repeated
• d) Has no effect either way

8. 🚪 The diagnostic question the chapter recommends is:

• a) "Am I really hungry?"
• b) "What started this — a cue, or an interval since food?"
• c) "How many calories is this?"
• d) "Do I deserve this?"

9. According to §33.4, Chapter 31's bad-night plan is actually:

• a) A nutrition intervention
• b) A cue intervention — the decision is made in advance by someone who isn't depleted
• c) A budgeting tool
• d) A form of restriction

10. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment showed that in screened, healthy men, semi-starvation produced:

• a) Nothing unexpected
• b) Obsessive food preoccupation, ritualized eating, low mood, and loss of fullness signalling during refeeding
• c) Improved mood and focus
• d) Effects only in those with prior eating problems

11. In §33.6's cycle, the load-bearing step is:

• a) Step 1, restriction
• b) Step 5, self-blame — because it is what drives the escalation at step 6
• c) Step 3, preoccupation
• d) Step 4, disinhibition

12. Restricting a specific palatable food in children produces:

• a) Reduced liking for it
• b) Increased wanting, more consumption when unsupervised, and higher reported liking
• c) No measurable effect
• d) Improved diet quality

13. Pressuring a child to eat a food produces:

• a) Increased liking
• b) Reduced liking for that food, persisting for years
• c) Short-term compliance and no long-term effect
• d) Better nutritional status

14. The division of responsibility in child feeding is:

• a) The child decides everything
• b) The adult decides what, when and where; the child decides whether and how much
• c) The adult decides everything
• d) Both negotiate at the table

15. The claim "you crave chocolate because you need magnesium" is:

• a) ✅ Well supported
• b) ❌ Not supported — cravings are learned, cue-driven and food-specific, not nutrient-specific
• c) 🟢 Probably true
• d) ⚗️ Untested

16. The clearest case of a genuine nutrient-specific appetite is:

• a) Magnesium
• b) Sodium
• c) Iron
• d) Vitamin C

17. Eating with other people produces:

• a) One consistent effect
• b) At least three — social facilitation, modelling, and impression management — which can oppose each other
• c) No measurable effect
• d) Reduced intake in all cases

18. §33.10's substantive criticism of intuitive eating is:

• a) It causes weight gain
• b) It is a homeostatic strategy, and says little about the hedonic system — "listen to your body" isn't useful guidance about a cue
• c) It has no evidence base at all
• d) It is too restrictive

19. Sleep is described as:

• a) Irrelevant to eating
• b) The intervention with the best ratio of effect to effort in the chapter — and tired people don't eat more broccoli
• c) Important only for athletes
• d) Effective through metabolic rate

20. 🚪 In §33.13's ranked table of thirteen interventions, how many work by changing the situation rather than the person?

• a) Three
• b) Nine
• c) Thirteen
• d) None

Answers

1. b) Two systems, and diets fight the wrong one. 🚪 ⚠️ Both halves matter, and the second is the one people miss. This is not "hunger is real and cravings are fake" — both systems are real, physiological, and neither is a moral category. §33.0.

2. b) Energy regulation. ⚠️ Ghrelin initiates, CCK/PYY/GLP-1 signal satiation, leptin tracks stores over days to weeks, and stomach distension signals VOLUME not energy — which is why soup and vegetables work. §33.1.

3. b) Satiation ends this meal, satiety delays the next. ⚠️ A large glass of water gives satiation and no satiety; a bowl of lentils gives both. Most "filling food" advice conflates them and then wonders why the effect doesn't last. §33.1.

4. b) Appetite. ⚠️ Chapter 24 §24.5, and this chapter builds directly on it. The body's response to losing weight is to make you hungrier, and to keep doing so. That is the homeostatic system working correctly — not a malfunction and not psychological. §33.1.

5. b) Different substrates, and they dissociate. ⚠️ Wanting is dopaminergic, cue-triggered and can be enormous; liking is opioid/endocannabinoid and much more stable. Theo's evening episodes scored wanting 8–9 and liking 3–5. §33.2.

6. d) Energy need. ⚠️ The hedonic system does not consult the homeostatic system before firing. It can and routinely does initiate eating in someone in energy surplus. §33.2.

7. b) Fails and makes it worse. 🚪 ⚠️ "Eat less" is an instruction to the system that didn't open the packet — and degrading energy status makes the reward system MORE responsive. You lower your defences against the system that wasn't the problem and strengthen the one that was. §33.3.

8. b) "What started this?" 🚪 ⚠️ "Am I really hungry?" is unanswerable in the moment and invites self-interrogation that helps nobody. Cue or interval determines which tool works, and using the wrong one is worse than doing nothing. §33.3.

9. b) A cue intervention. ⚠️ At the moment of collapse — when the hedonic system is most responsive and the homeostatic system is genuinely depleted — the decision has already been made, by someone who wasn't depleted. The shopping list is the same move one step upstream. §33.4.

10. b) Preoccupation, ritual, low mood, lost fullness signalling. ⚠️ The participants were psychologically screened, healthy young men with no history of disordered eating. The behaviours were PRODUCED by the restriction — not pre-existing traits revealed by it. §33.6.

11. b) Step 5. ⚠️ The self-blame is not decoration — it drives the escalation at step 6. A person who read step 4 as "predictable physiological consequence" rather than "moral failure" would not tighten the restriction, and the cycle would not amplify. §33.6, and Case Study 1's week 7 is the demonstration.

12. b) Increased wanting. ⚠️ The mechanism is §33.6 arriving before anyone has heard the word diet: restriction of a valued stimulus raises its salience. The child who eats the whole packet at a friend's house is behaving exactly as the restriction predicts. §33.6b.

13. b) Reduced liking, for years. ⚠️ Pressure converts eating from something you do into something done to you, which reliably reduces liking for anything. What works instead is repeated NEUTRAL exposure — and comment-free is the operative word, because praise works about as badly as pressure. §33.6b.

14. b) Adult: what, when, where. Child: whether, how much. ⚠️ It removes the adult from the part of the transaction they most want to control, which is why it is hard — and it is what the evidence supports. Marisol's summary: "the hardest part was not mentioning it." §33.6b.

15. b) ❌ Not supported. ⚠️ Four arguments: the craving isn't for the richest source (nobody craves spinach); cravings are culturally patterned and a detection mechanism shouldn't have a nationality; supplements don't satisfy the craving and the food does; and the claim is Chapter 2's healthy-user template inverted. §33.9.

16. b) Sodium. ⚠️ A genuine, specific, physiologically driven appetite with a known mechanism. Thirst is arguably another. ⚠️ There is no good evidence the mechanism extends to magnesium, chocolate, or the general run of things people crave. §33.9.

17. b) At least three, and they can oppose. ⚠️ Facilitation (meals with others are larger and longer), modelling (people adjust toward companions without noticing), impression management (less in front of people you want to impress). Which is why "eating with others makes you eat more" and "…eat better" are both defensible. §33.9b.

18. b) It is a homeostatic strategy. ⚠️ Excellent for someone who has been overriding internal cues with rules — which is a great many people. Weak against cue-driven eating, because "listen to your body" is not useful guidance about a bag of chips at 21:40: the body is not what is talking. ⚠️ And it gets one thing unambiguously right — forbidden-food lists increase craving. §33.10.

19. b) Best effort-to-effect ratio. ⚠️ Ghrelin up, leptin down, more waking hours, and — probably most importantly — increased reward responsiveness to palatable food specifically. Which is why it is striking how rarely eating advice mentions it. §33.11.

20. b) Nine of thirteen. 🚪 ⚠️ That distribution is the chapter's argument in a table. And the one intervention rated 🟠 counterproductive is "try harder." §33.13.

Scoring

Three items worth checking regardless of score.

Question 7. 🚪 ⚠️ If this one didn't land, the threshold hasn't.

Question 11. ⚠️ Step 5 is where an eleven-year pattern becomes a six-month one.

Question 20. ⚠️ Nine of thirteen. If the chapter has one number, it is that one.