Yearn after a delicious chocolate, with nuts and raisins or a great cappuccino filling? Well, it's enough to imagine the desire to devour, piece by piece, to eat less. At least, that the authors of a study published in the journal Science. They believe that the imagination can play an important role in rethinking the quantities we're eating daily.
Thinking about the smallest details to the product consumed - the removal of the package or "transportation" from plate to mouth by the way it is chewing and swallowing - will consume less than people who, before they eat it be thinking of something else than food or products other than those intended to delight.
It seems an exercise of imagination rather foolishly, but psychologists and nutritionists involved in the study say that its effectiveness is a very simple explanation. What matters when we prepare to eat a preferred food is the first bite. Not the sixth or the tenth. After two bites occur a kind of boredom - the brain already knows what to do, what to do next and that feeling is to try, so enthusiasm for the stimulus decreases. Moreover, learning the product to be consumed is the "key" with which researchers hope to help people eat less.
"The exercise of imagination can cause similar responses in the brain that gives them a real situation", says psychologist Morewedge Carey, Carnegie Mellon University. When we think of how I perform a certain task to activate the same brain circuitry as when we truly realize that task. Hence, researchers have concluded that it is worth investigating whether the men could learn already, with mind power, with food that is going to consume.
If the premise of the study seem somewhat amusing, the way it was made even more sympathetic. One of the experiments involving more volunteers and a few M&Ms chocolate candies. Members of a group of volunteers were asked to imagine that eating 30 candy coated and threw three in a washing machine. Other group members have imagined that eating three tablets and 30 thrown into a washing machine. Then, members of both groups had to eat from one bowl, one crave sweets. He showed that volunteers who saw in his mind munching 30 M & Ms ate 50% less than those whose imagination has been put together only three candy. In the latter case, the brain was not feeling induced habit of skill.
After another four types of experiments, the conclusion was clear: "If we think simply on a dish, we'll desire more to eat it. But if we think about how we consume the product, if we develop a detailed mental exercise of actual consumption, the desire to the product will deteriorate",says Morewedge. In other words, think of a portion of crispy fried potato strips with garlic sauce and you will go crazy with lust. Thinking about how you swallow each piece of crispy crunch and after you dip it into the sauce ,will make you ask for a serving of five pieces instead of eight. And when you're to leave, possibly couple to the plate.
The researchers decided to study the phenomenon more in detail. For example, to ask volunteers to come hungry to the experiments. And studies designed to determine exactly how this process takes effect outside the laboratory imaginative in everyday situations.
Let's imagine this!
