Few Easy Meditation Steps Before Eating Meals Lead You to Loss of Excess Weight - - New Study at Carnegie Mellon University

A cutback in caloric intake is the primary requirement of weight loss, which is possible to be realized by merely practicing some meditation before eating meals, a new study suggests which was led by Dr. Carey Morewedge from Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

The study demonstrates people be inclined to eat less of a food if they imagined the eating process frequently before they actually ate the food. And the study found the more food a person "ate" in his imagination, the less food subsequently he would eat.

In the study, according to what Dr. Morewedge told NPR Science Friday radio program, study participants were told to imagine the process of eating M&M, including moving the candies into a bowl, and then asked to eat the real food. Those who imagined eating 30 M&M ate much less real M&M than those who imagined eating only 3 M&M.

Dr. Morewedge further added that simply imagining moving the food did not help.

He said you also need to imagine eating what you are going to eat to reduce the consumption of the food. The study showed when participants imagined they were eating M&M, and then when they were assigned to eat cheese cubes, no matter how many M&M they ate in their imagination, they ate the same amount of cheese.

What works behind this trick is a process called habituation, according to Dr. Morewedge. According to this theory, people are less responsive to what they got habituated to. In the study case, after the participants imagined they ate lots of cheese cubes, they felt less urged to eat the food and they ate less of the food as a result.

But Dr. Morewedge told NPR that this imagination method does not work for other habits like smoking, which involves a more complex mechanism and imagining smoking could actually boost a smoker's craving for smokes and the smoker could actually smoke more.

Dr. Morewedge used cheese and M&M for the study. It is unknown whether this method would help people cut their consumption of a real meal which consists of multiple foods. Should the diners, like people going to have some Chinese buffet, imagine all the foods they are going to eat to reduce the consumption of the variety of real foods? Or would this method work at all in this case?

The study was published in a recent issue of Science, a prestigious scientific journal.

In China, two idioms describe two pitiful situations in which people don't have water to drink to quench their thirst and don't have food to eat to satisfy their hunger. In these situation as the idioms suggest, people may "look at prune to quench your thirst" and "draw a cake to satisfy your hunger".