Research paper
Kitsantas A. The role of self-regulation strategies and self-efficacy perceptions in successful weight loss maintenance. Psychology & Health. 2000;15(6):811-820. doi:10.1080/08870440008405583
Why we cite it
Applies Zimmerman's social cognitive self-regulation framework to weight maintenance, identifying the specific self-regulation strategies that **distinguish** successful weight maintainers from regainers. Relevant to the project because it records an **association** — people who maintained weight reported using more of these strategies, and reported higher confidence in implementing them, than people who tried and failed: goal-setting, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, environmental structuring, time management, social assistance, information seeking.
**What this record may not be used to say (corrected 2026-09-02, card SP97Y7).** The Contribution formerly read that the study *"shows that weight maintenance is not just about willpower or knowledge but about using specific, **learnable** self-management strategies."* **The design cannot carry either half.** It is cross-sectional — a structured questionnaire administered once, analysed by one-way ANOVA and correlation — so it cannot separate strategies that *produce* maintenance from strategies maintainers happen to report. And **nothing in it tested teaching anyone anything**: "learnable" is a property no measurement here touched. A page may say maintainers *use* more strategies. It may not say the strategies *work*, and it may not say they can be taught.
About the author
Anastasia Kitsantas, PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. She holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from the City University of New York (CUNY), where she studied under Barry J. Zimmerman, the leading self-regulation theorist. She is a Fellow of the APA (Division 15), the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Educational Research Association. She received the APA Division 15 Outstanding Dissertation Award (1997), the Barry J. Zimmerman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Studying and Self-Regulated Learning Research (AERA, 2019), and an Honoris Causa Doctoral Degree from the University of Ioannina, Greece (2024). She has published over 150 articles with approximately 23,600 Google Scholar citations and is named to the Stanford/Elsevier World's Top 2% Scientists list. At the time of this study she was at Florida State University.