--- title: Women Are More Open To Romance On A Full Stomach description: Women may be more responsive to romance if you feed them first, according to a new study published in the journal Appetite canonical: https://time.com/3988514/women-romance-food/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-10T21:11:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:58:15.024Z article:section: Health og:title: The Effect Eating Has on Female Desire: Study og:description: Women may be more responsive to romance if you feed them first, according to a new study published in the journal Appetite og:url: https://time.com/3988514/women-romance-food/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5357f3348466e646/69877f5355a859598ea85d43/heart-lollipops.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4233 og:image:height: 2381 og:image:alt: heart lollipops og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Effect Eating Has on Female Desire: Study twitter:description: Women may be more responsive to romance if you feed them first, according to a new study published in the journal Appetite twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5357f3348466e646/69877f5355a859598ea85d43/heart-lollipops.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Effect Eating Has on Female Desire: Study > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: A 100-Year-Old Sex Therapist on Having Good Sex, Then and Now [Watch (HLS stream): A 100-Year-Old Sex Therapist on Having Good Sex, Then and Now](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uJFYIrvP.m3u8) (3:13)  _Published 2014-08-20. A practicing sex therapist in New York City, Dr. Shirley Zussman has witnessed everything from the legalization of the contraceptive birth control pill to the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s to the rise of internet porn in the new millenium._  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Aug 10, 2015 9:11 PM UTC  Piruletas Piruletas Getty Images  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Aug 10, 2015 9:11 PM UTC Women may be more responsive to romance when they’re full. That’s according to the results of a small new brain-scan [study](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666315003153) published in the journal _Appetite_. Author Alice Ely, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, had already studied how women’s brains respond to images of fatty foods on an empty and full stomach and found that both their hunger status and dieting history did influence brain activation patterns. She wanted to see if a woman’s hunger state had an effect on another highly rewarding stimuli beyond food: romance. “We found that it did,” she says. Ely and her colleagues recruited 20 young women who were all normal weight. Half had tried at least twice in the past to lose weight, and half had never dieted. All of the women fasted for eight hours, then came to the lab hungry. The researchers sent them into an fMRI scanner, where the women viewed romantic pictures, like a couple holding hands, and neutral images, like a bowling ball. The researchers saw similar levels of activation between the two groups of women. They then drank 500 calories’ worth of a meal replacement drink and popped back into the scanner to look at the the same pictures again on a full stomach. This time, “they were more responsive to romantic cues,” says Ely, who hypothesizes as to why that might be the case: “Instead of being anxious and annoyed and irritable when you’re hungry…once we’re sated, then we can get on to better things.” Traci Mann, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota and a dieting researcher who was not involved with the study, says that the results make sense. When you’re fasting, you’re “entirely preoccupied and focused with thoughts of food,” she says. “It seems to me it would be hard for them to be drawn away from thinking about food to thinking about other things.” Interestingly, the post-meal brain activity in response to romantic cues was especially strong in the young women who had reported dieting in the past. Other research has shown that when dieters are offered rewards like food, they usually show a stronger brain response after they’ve eaten—”which suggests that they’re still kind of motivated to eat even once they’re nutritionally full,” Ely says. “But what we’re seeing is that’s kind of true for stuff beyond just food.” “There’s some evidence that people who are more impulsive or more reward-sensitive tend to eat more in certain situations, but there haven’t been too many imaging studies looking at this population and looking across different kinds of stimuli,” Ely explains. Ely cautions that it’s only a pilot study with a small group of women of the same age, and much more research is needed to draw any conclusions. “It’s all very speculative, but it’s still very interesting and a sort of unexpected finding,” she says—and not a bad excuse to take a crush out to dinner. ## Transcript Sexual pleasure is only one part of what men and women want from each other. They want intimacy, they want closeness, they want understanding, they want comfort, they want fun, and they want somebody who really cares about them beyond going to bed with them, and I think people are always seeking that. In every generation. [ MUSIC ] My name is Shirley Zussman. I just reached a hundred years of age, and I am a practicing sex therapist. I was invited with my husband to a lecture in New Jersey, in 1966. Masters and Johnson were the speakers. No body knew about them. Human sexual response had just been published, what I saw was a couple who will say that people had problems in an area in their lives that was very important and they were recognizing that it was all not just. Glamorous and wonderful to be sexual. One had to almost had to learn how to be a good partner and to endure the pleasure not only for yourself but for each other. And I thought we can do that. Why can't we do that? And we applied for training with Masters and Johnson at that time. The patients that came to us were people who read the paper. The only way they do anything about the work that was being done there. And the problems they came with, was somewhat different than the problems they come with today. Mostly, women came because would put out orgasmic, they didn't know how to achieve an orgasm, but they wanted one. It was so over that ,. Goal they had for themselves and how do I get there. That was one Masters and Johnson's contribution that there was a relatively simple way to start learning about your body. In other words, get, get to know your, who you are sexually and physically and that was. And encouragement for masturbation for learning what makes you feel good. I see a big change in the we view casual sex. In the 60's I think it was not just casual it was frantic. I'm shocked at the lack of connection with people; because of iPhones, even I love my iPhone. There is so much less actual physical connection, there's less touching, there's less talking, there's less holding, there's less looking, [ INAUDIBLE ]. People get pleasure from looking at each other. But the most common problem, I would say, in the sex therapy that I live in, is a lack of desire. You have to look at your priorities. You have to decide what is important to make you feel good about yourself and your life. 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