Norms for the rigid and flexible control over eating scales in a United States population

Westenhoefer [(1991). Dietary restraint and disinhibition: Is restraint a homogeneous construct? Appetite, 16, 45–55] argued that dietary restraint may not be a homogeneous construct but instead a combination of rigid control (RC) and flexible control (FC) over eating. These concepts hold promise for understanding some of the conflicting data in the restraint field. Scores on measures of RC and FC are often subjected to a median split, resulting in a less powerful and less informative dichotomous variable. It may, therefore, be useful to develop normative ranges of scores on these measures from very low to very high restraint. Such normative ranges have been developed in a German population but may not be applicable to men and women in the United States. To that end, the current study subjected the RC and FC scales to standardization in a college population.