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Here’s a neat diet tip – you can reduce how much food you eat by imagining you ate more than you really did.

Man sitting at a table surrounded by weird food

The “meal-recall effect,” or the ability to remember a recent meal, can reduce how much food a person eats later. Researchers from the University of Cambridge investigated the impact of imagining a recent meal as twice as big and satisfying as reality or recalling a recent meal in detail (e.g., what the food felt like when chewed and swallowed) on the meal-recall effect.

The meal-recall effect

In an experiment involving 151 participants, researchers found that imagining a meal as larger and more filling than reality resulted in 24g fewer biscuits being eaten later, equivalent to approximately two biscuits, or 122kcal fewer. Trying to vividly recall the meal, as if to relive eating it, did not elicit the meal-recall effect.

Lead author Dr. Joanna Szypula, who conducted the research while a PhD student at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, said,

“Your mind can be more powerful than your stomach in dictating how much you eat. Our findings could give people a method to control their eating with their mind.”

How the research was conducted

Participants in the experiment were given a microwave-ready meal of rice and sauce and a cup of water. They were asked to finish their meal if possible but not if it made them feel uncomfortably full. A three-hour interval followed in which participants were asked not to eat anything. They were then invited back to the lab to perform imagination tasks before a “taste test” of biscuits.

Participants were randomly allocated to one of five different groups. In three of the groups, participants were asked to recall their recent lunch at the lab. They were then asked to either imagine moving their recent lunch around a plate, recall eating their recent lunch in detail, or imagine that their recent lunch was twice as big and filling as it really was.

The fourth group was shown a photograph of spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce and asked to write a description of it before imagining moving the food around a plate. The fifth group was given the same tasks, but experimenters swapped spaghetti for stationery (paperclips and rubber bands).

Next, all participants took part in a bogus “taste test” of chocolate fingers, digestives, and chocolate chip cookies. Participants rated the biscuits on 12 different taste attributes (e.g., how crunchy, chocolatey, or salty they were). They were told that they were free to eat as many biscuits as they wished, as the biscuits would have to be disposed of at the end of the session for hygiene reasons. This was simply a ruse for covertly assessing snacking.

The group who imagined spaghetti hoops ate the most biscuits (75.9g), followed by the group who had been asked to imagine stationary (75.5g). The group who had been asked to move their lunch around the plate ate the third greatest quantity of biscuits (72.0g), followed by the group who relived eating their lunch (70.0g). Those who imagined their meal twice as big ate the fewest biscuits (51.1g).

Finally, all participants estimated the size of their lunch by spooning out rice and sauce to recreate their original portion sizes. Surprisingly, the group tasked with imagining the meal as twice as big as reality significantly underestimated portion size. This suggests that while people reduced their intake of biscuits following the imagination task, they were aware that their food portion was not actually as big as they imagined. It also suggests that the mechanism for this decrease in biscuit consumption is unlikely to be due to falsely remembering the meal as bigger than reality. No effect was found for the other groups.

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In-Article Image Credits

Man sitting at a table surrounded by weird food via Dream Like Art with usage type - Self. March 8, 2023

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Man sitting at a table surrounded by weird food via Dream Like Art with usage type - Self. March 8, 2023

 

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