Just thinking of eating can help keep the pounds off

mirahonthawall

An article I read not too long ago in the Toronto Star.....very interesting

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Just thinking of eating can help keep the pounds off

December 09, 2010

Joseph Hall
Health Reporter

Feasting on food in your head will calm your cravings for it, new research has determined.

Want to pig out on popcorn or devour a deep fried drumstick? Just imagine doing so in your mind and the desire will dissipate, a study released Thursday by the journal Science says.

“We found basically that repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food reduces the subsequent actual consumption of that food,” says Casey Morewedge, the lead study author.

“Imagining its consumption reduces one’s appetite for it,” says Morewedge, a psychologist at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.

One obvious ramification of the research is that people may be able to develop personalized diets right in their brains, Morewedge says.

“We think it can help them reduce the desire to consume, to eat less of the bad foods that they crave…and make healthier food choices,” he says.

Morewedge says the process is psychologically driven and doesn’t alter the hormonal feedback mechanisms of physical hunger.

Instead, it seems to “habituate” psychological cravings for food, a process that decreases the mental responsiveness to any given stimulus.

“It’s like a bright light coming out of a dark room, it will seem less bright after you’ve been exposed to it a while,” Morewedge says.

What wasn’t shown was whether this habituation, in the case of a food, required exposure to its actual smell, taste or texture, or if it could be driven by pure psychological processes.

“This is the first research to show that you can find habituation to food in the absence of exposure to it,” Morewedge says.

But the psychological process must key on images of eating.

Take the case of a chocolate bar, Morewedge says.

“If you just think about the chocolate bar and what it looks like and how it tastes and where you would eat it, that should increase your cravings for it,” he says.

“But if we perform the mental imagery that would accompany its actual consumption, it appears that this kind of imagined consumption can decrease our desire for the food we imagine eating.”

And this imaginary diet has a cumulative effect, he says, with appetites decreasing proportionately to the amount you gorge in your head, the multiple part study showed.

In one part, study participants – college students who believed they were engaged in a size perception trial – were asked to perform computer tasks that included eating different numbers of M&M’s candy.

When presented afterwards with an actual bowl of M&M’s, those who had imagined eating more consumed significantly less of the melt-in-your-mouth treats than those who had eaten less or none.

But the suppression of cravings is specific to the food that’s imaginarily consumed, Morewedge says.

For example, where a similar experiment run with computer cheese cube images suppressed appetites for real cheddar, it did nothing to cut consumption of M&M’s, he says.

Morewedge says the simple, try-this-at-home technique may also prove effective for smoking and alcohol consumption.

cjusticeg

I personally don't believe this one bit. Thinking about eating, smoking, or any kind of addiction will make you want it, that is just how the addiction centers in your mind work. You need to keep yourself busy, and not focus on doing whatever it is that you are thinking about.

Cytherea

This does seem counterintuitive... the more I think about a food I want, the more I WANT it... and get obsessed with having it! But maybe I'm not visualizing myself eating it enough? lol... interesting indeed.

HippyHorse

I could go either way on this one. One the one hand, if I just think about the food that I want I definately want it more. But I have found that actually imagining for just a moment or two, actually eating it bite for bite does make the craving subside. I doubt it would work in all cases though, it's just something I've found; probably depends on the person to a degree.

ohwhataday

You know I am a little bit in between. I crave really bad but amazing tasting foods allll the time. For instance, really yummy pizza. And usually it's late at night. I will think about it so much that it HAS to happen or I'll either just eat a bunch of other things and feel guilty, order the pizza and stuff my face and feel completely guilty minutes afterward OR not eat anything at all and suck it up for the night. I think it may just depend on the person and maybe the day/their mood. Etc.

Shirley61

I had a craving just last night. Nothing in particular but wanted
junk food. So I had some popcorn popped in olive oil.
It satisfied my craving and I added fiber to my diet. If this article
was true, how about those commercials at night for food all the
time. You may not want that particular food but you want something.
I have heard of mind over matter but Please.

whyflysouth

I know that being conscious of what you're eating can keep the pounds off - just the act of logging my food (even without any calorie goal for the day) makes me more guarded and hesitant to over indulge, so I'm not sure if this imagery is similar. I don't know, I've never gone through the act of imagining myself eating something, perhaps it works in that if you imagine it well enough.

There are some foods that I crave on occasion that are completely not like what I expect them to be. Like doughnuts, I might want a donut and associate so much pleasure in my mind with the taste of the donut, only to eat it and discover its greasy, not really appealing, and leaves me with a full stuffed feeling after eating it - Definitely not what I was expecting.

fromaquasar

I read an article about the same study in a NZ new paper, however it clarified that participants visualised eating MnM's to an excessive amount, they were asked to imagine vividly eating 50 plus MnM's one at a time.

They also tried with them imagining to eat cubes of cheese. They found that the people who had imagined eating MnM's when presented with the candy later that day ate less than HALF what the non imaginers ate. And same for the cheese eaters.

They also found that imagining MnM's didn't reduce amount of cheese they wanted and visa versa so it was food specific.

The theory is that with powerful visualisation you can make your body "sick of" something the same way if you ate 50 MnM's you wouldn't leap to eat more. This theory works in "real life" as well, it's a common treatment for smokers to smoke until they make themselves physically ill as a means of making the habit repulsive to them!

So whether you have the time and the ability to go through an intense visualisation process next time you have a craving it's an interesting study