How to Lose Weight: Think About Eating Instead of Actually Doing It

?The Los Angeles Times reveals the diet trick of anorexics everywhere: Imagine that you're eating food and then you won't be hungry.

Explaining the findings from the latest edition of Science, the newspaper notes that merely thinking about a food without actually seeing, touching, smelling, or tasting it can help sate hunger. The process is called habituation, but requires the somewhat tedious act of pretending to eat multiple bites of food (in the study, the participants visualized consuming 30 M&Ms, one after the next).

This seems like a reasonable diet, mostly because it takes almost half an hour to imagine chewing and swallowing 30 bites, and, by then, one's hunger pangs are probably diminished. But it also sounds like an eating disorder waiting to happen. Whatever, double chocolate crumb cake, you look so tasty.

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