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Department of Psychology
 Education: Ph.D. Florida State University
M.A. Florida State University
B.A. Georgia Southern University
Dr. Thaw specializes in the psychology of eating—taste, appetite, how we know when to eat and how we know when to stop. “We still don’t know a thing about why we get hungry and why we overeat,” he says, but he is looking into chemicals in the body that communicate with the brain and the stomach and tell the body to stop eating. He is also examining the role of immune-related factors in the control of appetite on rats.
In the meantime, Dr. Thaw is also putting together a program to help people lose weight in a realistic way. “There is no magic pill,” he says, “but I think I’m on to something.” Dr. Thaw has been training his own Millsaps students to be peer counselors to participants in the 12-week weight loss program, which teaches people how to adjust their lifestyle using three approaches. The first is proper nutrition and moderate calorie intake, the second is exercise, and the third is behavior and cognitions.
Dr. Thaw says he thinks it is overwhelming for people to try to lose weight because of the sheer volume of information in the marketplace about doing so. Crash diets, fad diets and get-thin-quick exercise regimes can work, but usually only temporarily. But, says Thaw, “weight is all about calories—as long as you’re reducing calories in some way, you will lose weight.”
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