Counterregulatory eating is the
psychological tendency for a person to
eat 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