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Abstract
Obesity is a paramount problem of the 21st century. Among working adults, nearly 70% are overweight or obese. High rates of obesity among working adults have detrimental effects on health related quality of life and organizational effectiveness. Current weight loss programs offered in worksite settings use individual strategies to improve nutrition and physical activity behaviors supported by modifications to the physical and social worksite environment to increase access to and support for healthy eating and physical activity. Such approaches have had significant but small effects on weight loss. The effects of workload on nutrition and physical activity has received little attention and has not been investigated in the context of the Job Demands-Resources model. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the role of workload and exhaustion on nutrition and physical activity behaviors using the Job Demands-Resources model. Two studies were conducted to examine the relationships between workload, exhaustion, nutrition, and physical activity behaviors. Participants, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, completed three surveys over a four week period. The first study examined the separate, cross-sectional relationships of workload and burnout on eating behaviors (cognitive restraint, emotional eating, uncontrolled eating), percent of calories from fat, and physical activity using data obtained in the first survey. The second study tested a mediation model where workload, exhaustion, and the nutrition and physical activity behaviors were temporally separated by a two-week period. Structural models and path coefficients were estimated using the two-step approach to structural equation modeling. In the first study, high workload and exhaustion were both related to more emotional and uncontrolled eating and a higher intake of fat. Additionally, exhaustion was related to lower levels of physical activity. In the second study, significant indirect relationships were observed for workload through exhaustion on emotional eating, uncontrolled eating, percent of calories from fat, and physical activity. There was a small but significant indirect relationship between workload and cognitive restraint for females only. Findings from these studies provide evidence that strategies addressing the effects of workload and exhaustion on health behaviors should be incorporated in worksite weight loss programs.