try this - decreases your craving

Does anyone here have any experience with NLP, like taking workshop somewhere or something? - not the Tony Robbins variety. I'm just trying my best (and I know written media is probably not the best medium to introduce a instruction like this the most effectively) to explain some of the basic concepts of how NLP works that could help people out.

that's about half the way how it works, (I'm kind of chuckling). What I meant was to 'pretend' to make the image of the food in your mind black and white and pretend it moving farther away. When you just pretend doing it, you'll notice your craving relating to that food slightly changing. If you revert back to thinking about it the original way you are more naturally (naturally- is a subjective word, where what happens naturally can usually be changed around over time) thinking about the food, then the cravings will come back. Just notice the feelings slightly changing when you do the food graying and moving further away exercise 10 times, nothing more.

What about Oreos? And I'm being serious because Oreos are my kryptonite.

I get this is more of a joking question than a serious question, but I'll give a serious reply if this helps further the discussion in a beneficial way.

The way to do it with Oreos is to gray out the image in your mind of it so that it becomes more faded, like a newspaper printout image. Take away the vibrant colors - for example, when you see a french fry in real life, versus the one on a McDonald's TV commercial, the real one is not as vibrantly yellow or golden as what you see in a advert. Same way with Oreos, instead of seeing the vibrant colored white and black, make the colors a bit dull, like photoshop editor reduced the color hue intensity. Imagine seeing a Oreo picture in a newspaper page that's a couple of weeks old. That should change the subtle craving for it and that's all I want you to do, notice the effect of the change. It's a small mental tool.

I think it's a really good idea actually and I'm going to try it next time I want something with my head when my stomach is actually okay and doesn't really need anything more.

I also have noticed myself feeling anxious sometimes about feeling hungry, as though it's doing me harm to be hungry. Which of course it's not - not when I've got almost half my body weight to lose. And mostly what's stopping me is in my head. So thank you, your idea might help!

I would recommend picking just one food you eat once in a while that you could probably do without, and just do this exercise in 30 seconds with that one food a couple times in your mind. And an important step 2 is to notice the feelings during those 30 seconds because those minute feeling changes are to help your subconscious mind learn the minute changes in emotions. Then an hour later, come back and do the same thing again, and notice the feelings again. This time it will be easier to do. When you come back in a day and do it again for 30 seconds, you will notice that making the images of food in your mind grayer and farther away for that one particular food will suddenly seem somewhat easier compared to the first time. This will be caused by the fact that the brain works similar like our muscles in that when we think a particular thought, our brain builds 'muscle' via firing off electrical signals and connecting and strengthening the neuro-synapses in our brain so make processing that thought stronger and easier. When we have lots of positive and powerful neuro-synapse formations of thoughts and electrical signals aiding us in the positive direction, we can truly become powerful weight-loss achievers.

For the second part -

Think about anxiety. What do you think of? What kind of images do you need to make inside your mind to make you feel the emotions of feeling nervous? What kind self-beliefs relating to hunger in your personal life must you have (or that you could give me and I could try on in my mind to replicate the similar style of anxiety around hunger that you are feeling?) to represent that anxiety or fear? What is causing you to have that feeling around hunger? When you become aware of the inner mind representations of images, the sizes and qualities of those image representations inside your mind, and the self-beliefs relating to those ideas, then you can alter your mind to never feel those feelings again. This is because your subconscious mind is powerful enough to begin maneuvering your thoughts in the right direction as soon as it aware of all the specific tools it needs to gracefully navigate itself in the right direction.