Adoption of Recommended Eating Behaviors Following Bariatric Surgery: Predicting Group Membership

Abstract

Purpose:

The current research was conducted to determine if responses to some social cognitive and psychosocial variables (e.g., maintenance self-efficacy, action planning, and depression) could accurately classify bariatric patients into one of three groups—maintenance, relapse, or recovery—related to adherence to postsurgical nutrition recommendations.

Method:

One hundred sixty-one female bariatric patients aged 18 years or older who had undergone surgery at least 6 months prior to participation were recruited for this study. Participants completed instruments that assessed social cognitive and psychosocial variables, and current nutrition behaviors. In general, it was hypothesized that the combination of the social cognitive and psychosocial variables would predict membership in one of the three groups.

Results:

Each of the three discriminant analyses performed to test the hypotheses yielded a significant first function. Maintenance self-efficacy, recovery self-efficacy, action planning, and coping planning combined to classify 54% of patients accurately. Depression, anxiety, time since surgery, and body mass index combined to classify 57% of patients accurately. Finally, the strongest predictors from each of the first two groups of variables (recovery self-efficacy, action planning, depression, and anxiety) accurately classified 58% of patients into one of the three groups.

Conclusions:

The findings suggested that it is possible to predict group membership in terms of adherence to postsurgical nutrition recommendations. More specifically, these findings suggest that recovery self-efficacy, depression, and anxiety have some predictive value and clinical relevance in terms of identifying patients at risk for poor postsurgery nutritional adherence.