In an experiment described in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, researchers asked volunteers to devote about a minute and a half to methodically imagining chewing and swallowing 30 M&Ms, one after another. Then, when presented with a bowl of M&Ms, those volunteers ate about half as many candies as volunteers who imagined eating only three M&Ms, or none at all…
Morewedge said he believes imaginary eating works because it triggers habituation, the psychological phenomenon that explains why we are able to get used to things that initially seem annoying — the roar of an airplane engine, for instance, or dim light in a restaurant. It occurs when extended exposure to a stimulus decreases an organism’s response to it, and many experts think it helps regulate eating…
Throughout the experiment, Morewedge said, the team directed test subjects to keep their minds focused on the repetitive aspects of eating. Without such instruction, he said, habituation would be unlikely. “When you just tell people to imagine a steak,” he said, “a flood of stimuli come through.”
The concept here is simple: Mindful eating. If you pay attention to your food and your eating, you pay attention to your body telling you when you are sated. That’s the same reason Europeans eating 2-3 hours long meals don’t get as fat. You want to get fat, eat fast food.
I’m all for the Slow Food Movement, if we only had 2 hour lunches and siesta in this country…
