Stay calm and be balanced: Equanimity and eating disorders

International audienceA growing body of research investigates equanimity as an outcome of mindfulness practices. Equanimity hasbeen defined as a stable and impartial mental state or trait, regardless of the affective valence of stimuli orsituations (Desbordes et al., 2015) and is linked to the absence of differences to approach or to avoid positiveas well as negative stimuli (Juneau et al., manuscript in preparation). With equanimity, the relationship tofood and to the body could create less extreme reactions and reduce automatic approach and avoidanceimpulses.According to this, equanimity could be a meaningful quality to help prevent eating disorders and obesity. Inorder to start investigating this relationship we ran a few correlational studies. After having created andvalidated an equanimity questionnaire on general population (EQUA-S, N = 265), we carried out a first onlinestudy on young women (N = 172).Results show that, following our hypotheses, women with higher equanimity scores had lower scores on theEating Disorder Inventory (EDI; Garner, Olmstead, & Polivy, 1983) and the Dutch Eating BehaviorQuestionnaire (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 valenceevaluations toward thin and larger bodies and less arousal according to their own subjective evaluation. Wealso found a mediation effect of negative affects (PANAS-N ; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) on therelationship between equanimity and EDI scores, a finding which is in line with well-known eating disordersrisk factors (e.g., Stice, 2001).Another brief study with adults without eating disorders (N = 52) showed the same results on arousalevaluation of food stimuli. Thus, people with higher equanimity evaluate the valence of food stimuli as moreneutral than people with lower equanimity.These results seem promising for perspectives on the prevention of problematic eating behaviors and thefutures studies will be discussed