Resisting delicious food is not so difficult if you know how our brain reacts to it.. Here are four simple psychological tricks to help curb your out-of-control appetite..

CHOCOLATE RITUAL Researchers at the Harvard Business School, led by behaviorist Francesca Gino, conducted a series of experiments to find out how different rituals affect our relationship with food.. In one experiment, participants were given chocolate bars and asked to do the following: without removing the wrapper, split the bar into two halves, then unwrap one half, eat the chocolate bar, and repeat the same with the other half of the bar.. The rest of the participants were asked to eat the chocolate as they wished.. Then the chocolate was replaced with carrots.. In both cases, the participants got noticeably more pleasure after eating, thanks to the ritual, a small amount of food.. “If we connect a ritual action, any food (sweet or ordinary) seems to us tastier, and we enjoy it longer instead of swallowing it quickly,” says Francesca Gino. The more often you repeat the rituals, the greater the effect they will give..

THINK GOOD Brian Wanzink, one of the world's most famous eating behavior researchers, advises: “Bad moods have a big impact on how many calories we end up eating. If we mentally (or aloud) remember at least one joyful event before eating, we eat less.. Examples: thank a friend for a good thing that happened today, talk to a colleague about the most joyful event of the day, or voice hope (to yourself) about what good news you expect tomorrow.

WHY IT'S GOOD TO Pamper Yourself Occasionally University of Oregon physiologists asked teenagers to drink a milkshake and then performed a CT scan of the brain. The pleasure centers of participants who were accustomed to eating ice cream regularly were less responsive than those who ate ice cream infrequently.. Conclusion: as mammals, we all naturally tend to prefer high-calorie foods, but the more we indulge in goodies, the less we enjoy them.. As a result, over time, the brain requires either even more high-calorie food, or an increase in its quantity..

EAT TREATS… MENTALLY If you mentally imagine how you eat chocolate, cakes or any other favorite food, the seemingly irresistible desire to eat them in reality disappears. At the same time, it is necessary to imagine a delicacy in large quantities - that is, for example, to eat in your imagination not one piece of chocolate cake, but ten in a row.

The experiment looked like this.

The participants were divided into two groups - one was asked to mentally eat three candies, the other - thirty. Then everyone was given real candies and it turned out that the participants who “ate” 30 candies ate half as many real candies as those who imagined only three. “It is important to visualize the process of eating a treat in detail – biting, chewing, swallowing,” emphasizes Morewedge.. “The more detailed your imagination works, the more likely it is to lull your appetite.”.

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