Counterregulatory eating is the

psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between t ...

tendency for a person to

eat Eating (also known as consuming) is the ingestion of food, typically to provide a heterotrophic organism with energy and to allow for growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive — carnivores eat other animals, herbi ...

more after having recently eaten. It is a behavior opposite to regulatory eating, which is the normal pattern of eating less if one has already eaten. It is more common among dieters, for whom a large "pre-load" (the food eaten first) is presumed to sabotage motivation for restricted eating. It was coined the "what-the-hell" effect by dieting researcher Janet Polivy in 2010. She describes this effect as the type of thinking which says, "What the hell, my diet's already broken, so I might as well eat everything in sight." It has been observed that reducing the guilt of overeating through self-forgiveness can mitigate counterregulatory eating.

References

Eating behaviors of humans {{Cognitive-psych-stub