The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a 20-35 percent daily intake of fat. Resisting the temptation to eat high-fat foods, in conjunction with stage of readiness to avoid these foods, has been shown to influence healthy behavior change. Data ( N = 6516) from three randomized controlled trials were pooled to examine the relationships among direct intervention effects on temptations and stage of change for limiting high-fat foods. Findings demonstrate separate simultaneous growth processes in which baseline level of temptations, but not the rate of change in temptations, was significantly related to the change in readiness to avoid high-fat foods.
Keywords: high-fat diet; latent growth curve modeling; stage of change; temptations.