Can We Stop Food Longing ThroughImaginary Eating?

Are you fighting an urge to reach forchocolate? Then, let it melt in your mind, not in your mouth. According to therecent research, imagining eating a specific food reduces your interest in thatfood, so you eat less of it.

This reaction to repeated exposure tofood—being less interested in something because you\'ve experienced it toomuch—is called habituation.________

The research is the first to show thathabituation can occur through the power of the mind. \"If you just thinkabout the food itself—how it tastes and smells—that will increase yourappetite,\" said Carey More wedge, a well-known psychologist. \"Itmight be better to force yourself to repeatedly think about chewing andswallowing the food in order to reduce your longing.________Visualizing yourself eating chocolatewouldn\'t prevent you from eating lots of cheese,\" he added.

More wedge conducted an interestingexperiment. 51 subjects were divided into three groups. One group was asked toimagine putting 30 coins into a laundry machine and then eating threechocolates.________Another group was asked to imagineputting three coins into a laundry machine and then eating 30 chocolates. Lastly,a control group imagined just putting 33 coins into the machine—with nochocolates.________When they said they had finished, thesewere taken away and weighed. The results showed the group that had imaginedeating 30 chocolates each ate fewer of the chocolates than the other groups.

________Physical signals—that full stomachfeeling—are only part of what tells us we\'ve finished a meal. The researchsuggests that psychological effects, such as habituation, also influence howmuch a person eats. It may lead to new behavioral techniques for people lookingto eat more healthily, or have control over other habits.

A. What\'s more,this only works with the specific food you\'ve imagined.

B. People wereadvised to try different methods to perform the experiment.

C. For example, atenth bite is desired less than the first bite, according to the study.

D. All of them thenate freely from bowls containing the same amount of chocolate each.

E. It meant thosewho repeatedly imagined eating would concern about some specific food.

F. This requiresthe same motor skills as eating small chocolates from a packet, the study says.

G. This study ispart of the research looking into what makes us eat more than we actually need.