Just thinking of eating can help keep the pounds off
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.
~The Toronto Star
