The New Zealand Eating Behaviour Questionnaire Platform

A test to identify your personal eating behaviour

• Understanding your unique eating behaviour phenotype helps you to identify why you eat, what drives your weight gain and prevents you from achieving lasting weight loss success.
• Your eating drivers or motivation to eat are those inert signals that compel you to eat and that may overwhelm your willpower during any dieting attempt.

Please ask yourself

Why do I eat? What motivates me to eat?

• What are the internal drivers that propel me to eat in different situations?
• Please add one sentence.

What are eating behaviour phenotypes?

• Eating behaviour phenotypes are observable patterns or traits of how people behave in relation to food.
• A person's genetic predispositions determine some of these phenotypes related to weight gain.
• Others are learned behaviours and are related to environmental factors.
• Eating behaviour phenotypes can be divided into three main groups.

Feasters or reduced satiation

The absence of the feeling of fullness during meals can lead to larger portion sizes and overeating.

Ask yourself – do you get a good sense of fullness during a meal?

• Satiation is the feeling of fullness that tells your brain to stop eating. Reduced satiation makes it challenging to recognise when to stop eating, leading to delayed meal termination and unwanted overeating.
• Satiation is determined by satiety hormones derived from your gut that relay to your brain a sense of fullness and that slow the emptying of your stomach.
• Adaptations of those satiety hormones are used in modern weight management medications that work best among individuals with this dominant phenotype.
• The questionnaire will determine the extent of your degree of feasting-type eating behaviour.

Constant Hunger or reduced satiety

Struggling with a powerful hunger sensation between meals

Ask yourself: Do you get hungry when you haven’t had a meal in a while?

• Satiety is the sensation of fullness and not wanting or needing to eat.
• Having a reduced satiety phenotype means that you frequently struggle with hunger and often look for food.
• You may also notice an early return to hunger after a meal.
• Satiety is related to the transit of food through your stomach, the background level of hunger hormones, and your metabolism.
• Certain weight management medications and dietary modifications can help with this sensation and allow greater control over your eating.
• The questionnaire will assess your degree of constant hunger-type eating behaviour.

Emotional Eating

A strong desire for comfort foods to deal with emotional triggers

Ask yourself – do you use food to make you feel better, to comfort you or to reduce stress?

• Emotional eating occurs when you use food to cope with your emotions rather than to address hunger; you eat to make yourself feel better.
• Food can be a coping mechanism when you feel sad, bored, lonely or unduly stressed.
• Such a behaviour can be measured with questionnaires and may be related to a multitude of past and present experiences, and emotional states such as low mood and anxiety.
• Interventions such as cognitive behavioural therapy and certain medications that address these eating behaviours or related psychological problems may help.
• Identifying whether you exhibit some of these eating behaviours through the questionnaire may support your weight loss success.

How the questionnaire works

• The questionnaire is straightforward. Try the training and instruction pages to understand the test.
• We will ask you specific questions related to your eating behaviours or habits.
• Questions are presented on continuous scales or sliders, and we ask you to place the cursor on the point that best represents your general perception or feeling.
• There are also image questions that will be explained as you go along.
• You must allow yourself sufficient time to reflect on the question before you answer.

What will happen once you have completed the questionnaire?

How do we calculate your unique eating behaviour scores?

• We will use your answers to calculate your eating behaviour type and compare the strengths of your eating behaviours with a reference population, telling you whether you have more powerful drivers to eat than others.
• We know that this relates to your body weight and your likelihood of succeeding with weight loss.
• Results will be presented in easy-to-understand graphs at the end of the test.
• We also use AI to translate those numbers into a personalised text that describes your unique eating behaviours (future feature).
• We will provide general recommendations; however, the decision to discuss and implement any suggestions will be left to you and your healthcare professional.

How to use the results for your weight loss journey?

Identify your unique eating behaviour phenotype to improve your long-term weight loss

• Your unique eating behaviour phenotype can be assessed with the questionnaire
• It can guide your health care professional to find the most suitable diet and weight management medication for you
• You can track how your eating behaviour changes in response to medications, finding out early whether the medication you use is having an effect and will lead to weight loss
• Increases your awareness of eating behaviours in your day-to-day routines, as this can lead to behaviour change and sustainable success

Clinical studies

Articles in peer-reviewed journals of the New Zealand Eating Behaviour questionnaire for phenotype-guided treatment allocation.

• The New Zealand Eating Behaviour Questionnaire was validated in three large cohorts of patients with obesity related complications.
• The questionnaire had good internal reliability, validity and reproducibility.
• The latest study of the research team revealed twice as much weight loss in patients treated with medication matching their dominant eating behaviour phenotype identified in the NZ-EBQ, compared with an eating behaviour incongruent medication use.
• The medication studied is called Contrave (Naltrexone/Bupropion combination) and had greater benefit for patients with an emotional eating phenotype compared with those with a reduced satiety phenotype.
• The knowledge gained through phenotyping supports clinicians in using the most appropriate medication for their patients, which is a step towards a precision medicine approach.

• View Publications

Publications

• Schmiedel O, Ivey M, Liu A, Murphy R. The New Zealand eating behavior questionnaire - Validation study for a novel assessment tool to describe actionable eating behavior traits. Appetite. 2023 Dec 1;191:107066

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37852374

Here, researchers tested whether the New Zealand Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (NZ-EBQ) could identify individual eating behaviour patterns. The NZ-EBQ looks at three main eating behaviours:

1. Feasting – finding it hard to stop eating once you start
2. Constant hunger – feeling hungry again soon after eating
3. Emotional eating – eating more when feeling stressed, sad, or upset

This study included people living with obesity, some of whom were on weight-loss medications. The researchers checked whether the questionnaire could reliably measure the three eating behaviours. Participants' answers were mostly consistent when they repeated the survey later, especially for emotional eating. When examining body weight, the study found that higher scores on any of the three eating patterns were associated with higher body mass index (BMI).

Overall, the findings show that the NZ-EBQ is a reliable tool for identifying personal eating behaviour traits. The results may help healthcare professionals better understand what drives someone's eating, for example, whether emotional eating or constant hunger plays a bigger role. This can help to tailor treatments such as lifestyle advice, nutrition support, or medication more precisely to each person's needs.

• Schmiedel O, Ivey M, Murphy R. Broader Validation of New Zealand Eating Behavior Questionnaire as Clinical Assessment Tool to Identify Actionable Eating Behavior Traits. Nutrients. 2025 Mar 17;17(6):1049

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40292445

This study took the New Zealand Eating Behavior Questionnaire (NZEBQ) to the next level, testing it in two separate more diverse groups, including people with higher body weight and different ethnic backgrounds. Unlike the earlier study, it focused on real-world reliability and how well the questionnaire captures three key eating patterns: feasting, constant hunger, and emotional eating. The results showed it works consistently across different people, with higher scores linked to higher body weight. This means the NZEBQ can help clinicians identify individual eating traits and design more personalized strategies for managing weight.

Demographics

Please tell us a bit about yourself to help interpret your Eating Behaviour score.

Thank You!

• Thank you for taking the time to complete the questionnaire. Your responses will help us calculate your unique eating behaviour phenotype.
• The results will help you better understand your drivers for eating, which is a great starting point for achieving sustainable loss. The results may also help your clinician to select the most effective weight management medication for you.
• Here we are asking for height and weight data to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI) to interpret your individual data in a broader context.
• This response helps you understand how your unique eating behaviour relates to your BMI and to the background population.
• Your responses will remain completely anonymous. No personally identifying information will be collected, and your answers cannot be traced back to you. We will only collect aggregated data and trends, and your individual answers will remain confidential.