' Enjoy a delicious cake today and eat healthily tomorrow ' : Compensatory Health Beliefs and their impact on health

37 such situations the immediate desire to indulge in the pleasant behaviour like eating the cake can interfere with our longterm goals (e.g., be healthy or lose weight). According to Muraven and Baumeister (2000) humans strive to achieve· an ideal balance between the completion of their desires and the pursuit of their own goals. This search of the ideal balance between maximum pleasure and minimal disadvantage is called the hedonic principle. However, the interaction between our desire and our health goals can lead to a motivational conflict (Rabiau, Knauper, & Miquelon, 2006), or so-called cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), because of the incompatibility between both goals. This dissonance generates a state of pressure, whose resolution requires self-regulatory processes to deal with the aversive state of dissonance (Rabiau et al., 2006). According to the Compensatory Health Belief (CHB) Model one possible strategy to diminish this conflict is to use/employ Compensatory Health Beliefs (Knauper, Rabiau, Cohen, & Patriciu, 2004).