Imagining Gorging On Your Favorite Food Eases Cravings And Helps You Eat Less
Editor's ChoiceMain Category: Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness
Also Included In: Nutrition / Diet; Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 09 Dec 2010 - 19:00 PDT
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If you want to lose weight, imagine that you are devouring your favorite food repeatedly; apparently your cravings will ease, you will end up eating less food, and your diet is more likely to be successful, scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, revealed in the journal Science today.
This amazing discovery goes against the general assumption that the best way to control the urge to eat something is to keep it out of your mind.
Assistant Professor Carey Morewedge and team set out to find out whether imagining consuming a food again and again had any effect on reducing a person's appetite for it. They explained that research had demonstrated that both perception and imagining something get the neurons going in a similar way, and also affect emotions, response tendencies and motor behavior similarly.
Their study found that visualizing (imagining) the consumption of a specific food does lower an individual's appetite for it.
Morewedge said:
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"These findings suggest that trying to suppress one's thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy. Our studies found that instead, people who repeatedly imagined the consumption of a morsel of food - such as an M&M or cube of cheese - subsequently consumed less of that food than did people who imagined consuming the food a few times or performed a different but similarly engaging task. We think these findings will help develop future interventions to reduce cravings for things such as unhealthy food, drugs and cigarettes, and hope they will help us learn how to help people make healthier food choices."
In the first study, individuals imagined performing 33 repetitive actions, one after the other:
- Control Group - they imagined they were inserting 33 coins into a automatic washing machine; an action similar to placing M&Ms in your mouth.
- Coins and 3 M&Ms Group - they imagined they placed 33 coins into a washing machine, followed by eating 3 M&Ms.
- 3 Coins and 30 M&Ms Group - they imagined placing three coins into the washing machine followed by eating 30 M&Ms.
In the next experiment, the participants had to manipulate (physically act out) the placing of coins in the laundry machine and eating the M&Ms. The result was the same, those who imagined consuming the 30 M&Ms ate much fewer chocolates than those in the other two groups.
The additional experiments showed that the participants gradually became smaller eaters of their favorite fattening foods after more imagination sessions. It was caused by habituation, and not by a change in the perception of the of the taste of the food or some other priming mechanism.
The researchers explain that only by imagining eating a specific food does its consumption go down. In other words - the specific food being eaten had to be imagined for its consumption to go down, rather than imagining eating another food, such as potato chips, in order to reduce chocolate consumption.
Team member, Professor Joachim Vosgerau, said:
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"Habituation is one of the fundamental processes that determine how much we consume of a food or a product, when to stop consuming it, and when to switch to consuming another food or product.
Our findings show that habituation is not only governed by the sensory inputs of sight, smell, sound and touch, but also by how the consumption experience is mentally represented. To some extent, merely imagining an experience is a substitute for actual experience. The difference between imagining and experiencing may be smaller than previously assumed."
Carey K. Morewedge, Young Eun Huh, Joachim Vosgerau
Science 10 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6010 pp. 1530-1533 DOI: 10.1126/science.1195701
Written by Christian Nordqvist
Copyright: Medical News Today
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Visitor Opinions (latest shown first)
Puh-leese!
posted by Greta on 16 Dec 2010 at 10:54 amTo Paul Gros, above . . .
This newsletter is a forum for science and research and thoughts and opinions related to such. No one needs/wants a Jesus lecture. If that's what we want we know where to find it - in an appropriate religious group which is not what this forum is about.
The conclusion in the article is a results of scientific results, to be discussed in that matter - not jesus-judged via a judgmental and lecturing reader of this newsletter.
As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
posted by Paul Gros on 9 Dec 2010 at 9:59 pmThis is a false conclusion, to think the more you think of something bad that good things will follow.
Jesus said, that if you even look at a woman in lust
you have already committed audultery with her.
Imagination can be a dangerous thing.
Why not just see yourself as being thin without the dangerous lusting and greed.
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