You swore you would resist it this time. You knew it was going to be extremely difficult because the seduction will be consistent and powerful. You experienced it everywhere in different colors, aromas, configurations, reinforced with unmitigated revelry. In every venue, every beast and plant known to nourish and satisfy humans was sacrificed to the altar of good cheer and communal celebration. In other words, you ate your heart out during the holidays. Now it is time to go on a diet and you have tried all diets known to humans from every magazine and cable channel worldwide and none worked for you. What next? Try imagining eating food. Lots of it.
Yes, the latest scientific study showed that imagining eating food repeatedly may just help you eat less. In five different experiments in this study, they had subjects eating 30 M&Ms instead of three or 30 cheese cubes instead of three. They found that those who imagined eating 30 of the same kind of food ate less than the other groups who did not imagine eating that food, imagined a different kind of food, or imagined eating less. The study entitled “Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption” by Carey K. Morewedge, Young Eun Huh, and Joachim Vosgerau was published in the journal Science last Dec. 9.
I also listened to the NPR.org podcast interview of Ira Flatow with one of the authors of the study, Professor Carey Morewedge of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Morewedge explained that what may be happening in the study was that people ate less because they became “habituated” to the food that they imagined they were eating in sizeable quantities. “Habituation” means getting used to a particular thing or activity with repetition that you end up desiring it less. What was even more interesting is that Morewedge acknowledged how this “habituation” is also seen in studies on income (people do not become continuously happier with increasing income). I have also come across this “habituation” effect in studies on love and sex. It is that “sameness” throughout time that could make things familiar and less desirable although not detestable.
There have been many studies backing up the claim that to our brains, an imagined thing IS the same as the real thing. This was true when it comes to imagining an image, how to work a tool, or recalling a memory that conjures up the same emotion as when it happened in real time. In fact, it is also true, not just in experiments but in real life that thinking about food could make you want it. So the trick lies in imagining not the food or the first few bites but eating a lot of that kind of food in order to eat less of it.
The researchers who did the study recognize that there are a lot of things that could make us eat less but they said that this is the first to show that the pure thinking of eating a lot of something could help us lessen our consumption of that particular food. This may be helpful as we all start the feast of leftovers. Perhaps you can try this one and imagine your way to a slimmer you. If that does not work, just ask your sweetheart or doctor (whoever insists on it) to simply imagine a slimmer you since science says that an imagined one is as good as the real thing. Good luck and let me know if you survive that argument.
* * *
For comments, e-mail dererumnaturastar@hotmail.com