Have you noticed that looking at photos from cookbooks and magazines makes you hungry? Our brain reacts to a bright picture as if it were a real dish. But the power of imagination can also be used to stop overeating.
Imagine a freshly cut slice of lemon. What will you feel? Most people will have a sour taste in their mouths and saliva will begin to be actively produced, although there is not a single lemon nearby. The same thing happens when we dive into an interesting book. By themselves, small black icons on white paper are not able to captivate us, but they make our imagination work, evoke mental images that touch us, create an emotional and physical connection with the book, do not let us tear ourselves away from it.
Advertising, including food advertising, is built on this property of the brain. The picture cannot be eaten, but by looking at it, we create a mental image that stimulates physical reactions – appetite increases, and it is difficult for us to resist overeating.
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A stream of food advertising pours down on us continuously and from all sides – huge chocolates on street billboards, hot pizza with melting cheese on the screen, and so on. Food stylists and food pornographers amplify our reaction several times over by masterfully using the art of cinema and photography in food advertising: large pictures, color pictures, close-ups – all this affects the imagination more than small black-and-white images.
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Due to the fact that our brain is forced to constantly process a huge number of images associated with food, it is very difficult to resist temptations. The German psychotherapist, director of the Institute for Nutritional Problems in Hamburg, Cora Besser-Sigmund, offers a solution – to install a protective filter in the head that will help not let excessive food stimuli into consciousness *.
Get a good cookbook or cookbook. Select 15-20 most appetizing, in your opinion, pictures. Print them out in black and white. Now compare the received copies and originals in pairs – you can put a copy on the next page of the book near a color picture or, if you took a magazine, decompose pairs of photographs into transparent files so that one side is color and the other is black and white.
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1. Sit quietly in front of your paired pictures and pick up the color one first. Let the seductive impulse affect you for about 10 seconds. Then quickly change the color picture to a black and white one and stare at it twice as long, about 20 seconds. Focus on your feelings – you will feel how the temptation coming from the food shown in the picture is gradually fading away. Little by little, you “cool” your appetite and sober up, illusions go away – a pleasant feeling of freedom returns to you. Repeat this exercise for three days for 5 minutes. You can also go through magazine clippings for a minute or two from time to time.
2. After three days, check if the training has brought results. Bring a colored picture to your eyes. Close your eyes and mentally turn it into black and white, “banishing” all colors from it. Feel the pleasant sensation of physical release from the power of these obsessive images, disappointment in them.
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3. After another three days, you can move on to training in the real world. Extend your workouts to… a refrigerator, a supermarket, and a set table. When you see real food, mentally replace it with a black and white picture using the power of your imagination and feel the sense of release again.
“After a week of training, the brain will learn this new way of perceiving food objects and will automatically carry out the “disappointment” procedure – like a child who, having mastered the multiplication table in a week, begins to give the correct answers without any problems,” says Cora Besser-Sigmund.
Try different settings for your food filter to see what works best for you. Look at product pictures through strong color filters: blue, purple, green, yellow. Mentally reduce the size of the pictures or enlarge them to fantastic sizes: for example, imagine haystack-sized chocolate truffles, carousel-sized cakes, and so on. So you will eventually find what works for you most effectively.
* K. Besser-Sigmund “How to stop bulimia” (Arnebia, 2008).