In a society where the ideal beauty figure is embodied by a thin woman without a gram of fat, it is not strange that people are constantly following the most diverse diets to lose weight. Unfortunately, these diets allow us to lose weight at the cost of an atrocious sacrifice and then, after a few months and as if by magic, the kilos we had lost return. This is what is known in Psychology as the “Rebound Effect” and in popular language it has been immortalized with the phrase: “the difficult thing is not to arrive, the difficult thing is to stay.”
Fortunately, there are some tricks to eat less and not even feel that visceral hunger that leads us to eat more calories than necessary. In fact, the main problem with most diets that exist today is that they are too restrictive and do not take into account the psychological factor.
3 psychological tricks to eat less that works
1. Choose smaller dinnerware
If your plates and glasses are smaller, you will tend to eat much less and still feel full. This is because sight plays a fundamental role when it comes to feeding us. In fact, a curious experiment was carried out years ago that demonstrates this idea.
The researchers asked people to eat until they felt satisfied. They left the room and left them with a bowl of soup in front of them. The funny thing is that some of them had soup pumped from under the table, making their plate always half full (although they didn’t know it, obviously).
As a result, these people ate much more but reported the same level of satiety as those who had eaten half but watched the soup run out. Therefore, smaller dishes will not only encourage you to eat smaller portions but will also make you feel more satisfied.
2. Change the colors of the plates
At this point it has already become clear that we also eat with our eyes, that we not only taste a dish with our taste buds but also with our eyes. In fact, research has shown that when there is a strong contrast between the color of the plate and the food, we find them much more appetizing and we will tend to eat more.
In reality, it is nothing new since we all know that a carefully decorated salad, where the colors of the vegetables stand out, is more attractive than a badly chopped salad and placed haphazardly on any plate. Obviously, it is not about being careless in food preparation but simply about using dishes that do not create a visual contrast that subsequently awakens hunger.
3. Keep foods you don’t want to eat away from you
The simple act of removing a tempting food from our reach already helps us control the desire to eat it. Why? Because when we put a distance between the object we desire and ourselves, we are emotionally detaching ourselves from it (at least in part) and, therefore, we assume an advantageous position to combat temptation. In addition, putting distance also gives us time to be aware of what we are about to do and control our impulses.
This trick to eat less has also been demonstrated in a very curious experiment. On this occasion, a group of workers were told that they were going to be rewarded for their results with the possibility of eating all the chocolates they wanted for a month. The interesting thing was that one group had the bowl of chocolates placed on their desk every day and another group was placed two meters away. The results? When the bowl was within reach, people ate an average of 9 chocolates a day, but when it was two meters away the average decreased to 4 chocolates a day.
