"The Appetite study was conducted at the University of Birmingham in England. Twenty-nine women were fed identical lunches: a ham sandwich, chips, and water, about 500 calories in total. Some of the students ate their lunch with only their random thoughts as company. Others ate while reading a newspaper story about changes in the size of chocolate bars and fizzy drinks in England. The rest ate while listening to a three-minute audio clip encouraging them to focus on the look, smell, flavors, and textures of their food. An hour later, the professors brought the students back and put before them plates of cookies, among them chocolate chip and chocolate fingers (apparently a British thing; we will trust that they are appealing). The students who focused on their lunch ate roughly 50 percent fewer chocolate-chip cookies and 60 percent fewer chocolate fingers than their newspaper-reading and mindless-eating counterparts. Or as the researchers put it: 'Rated vividness of lunch memory was negatively correlated with snack intake.'"
The middle-of-the-afternoon is hardest for me when it comes to snacking. Even now I'm finding myself wondering what's in our cupboards that I could snack on. But when I turn my thoughts to what I had for lunch, that craving subsides a bit. Maybe I'll start focusing more on my food as I eat it... and maybe that will help me just enjoy it more too...
I fully believe this finding. At the same time, it is sometimes SO HARD to focus on your eating when there are 65,000 other things to do . . .
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