New research has shown that by imagining yourself eating certain foods may help you eat less. This challenges the idea that thinking of a food make you want it more and will make you eat more of it once you get it.

It was found that people who repeatedly imagined eating a certain food, subsequently ate less of it than they would have otherwise.

According to the results, “trying to suppress one’s thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy,” says Carey Morewedge, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon and author of the study.

“We think these findings will help develop future interventions to reduce cravings for things such as unhealthy food, drugs, and cigarettes; and hope they will help us learn how to help people make healthier food choices,” Morewedge says in a news release.

One of the experiments had a group that imagined putting money into a laundry machine and imagining that they got M&Ms and were eating them one at a time. This made them eat less.

In each of the cases where volunteers repetitively imagined eating the food, a gradual reduction in the motivation to obtain the food and a decrease in the consumtion of that food were noted.

Tags: tips, weight loss