Pretending to savour food may help reduce craving

LONDON - Pretending to savour the snack you are trying to give up might help you curb cravings for that food.

Researchers have found that imagining the act of eating chocolate seems to trick the brain into thinking that it has already been consuming it, reducing the motivation to eat more.

Scientists believe the technique could also help people to reduce their cravings for cigarettes and drugs, the Telegraph reports.

Carey Morewedge, assistant professor of social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, said: “These findings suggest that trying to suppress one’s thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy.

“Our findings show that repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food reduces its subsequent actual consumption because imagining its consumption reduces one’s appetite for it,” said Morewedge, according to a Carnegie statement.

“For example, if you want to eat less cake at the end of your meal, you would have to imagine eating cake right before you ate it.”

The researchers fed 51 volunteers with M&Ms chocolate and cheese cubes in a series of experiments to examine the effect.

In one experiment, the participants imagined 33 repetitive motions, with half of them imagining eating 30 M&Ms and then inserting three coins into a laundry machine. The other half imagined eating three sweets and inserting 30 coins.

They were then all asked to eat their fill from a bowl of M&Ms.

The researchers found that those who had imagined eating more of the sweets only ate three M&Ms on average from the bowl while others ate five or more.