Tips On How To Teach Your Mind To Get Over Food Cravings

By Emilia Quiroga


When you wish to shed weight or to eliminate certain food items or food groups from your day-to-day diet you have to be good at managing how you think about such food. A good mental method towards your eating plan and diet is required.

If you watched the movie "Five Year Engagement" you might have seen the reference to the "Marshmallow Experiment" and then the subsequent screening of these research findings with stale donuts. The marshmallow experiment was conducted by Walter Mischel of Stanford University and essentially tried a child's ability to delay gratification.

In brief, each kid was told that they could have one marshmallow now or 2 later on if they were able to wait. They were placed in a place with a marshmallow in front of them. Some children just ate the marshmallow immediately. Others tested out a variety of methods in their attempt to wait. About a third of the 600 kids who were tested effectively delayed their desire for getting gratification.

Walter Mischel later on learned that those children who had been good also done better in their SAT exams years later. Thus a link between showing an instinctive ability to find a strategy to delay gratification and that of success in later life can be seen.

How can this info help you to develop a great strategy towards slimming down or curbing cravings? It seems that maybe one third of us have got a natural ability to find a good coping strategy while the rest of us find the task a little more difficult.

But mainly because something doesn't come naturally to us does not mean that it's not possible. In fact, our own brains have got a great and natural element of "plasticity" and we could know new mental abilities on a continuing basis. All we need to do then is to become aware of the mental strategies used by those who are good in delaying gratification, and then copy them.

That probably sounds very easy, but it really is a simple task. Your own attitude, your mental technique upon embarkation of a task is a very accurate predictor of your outcome. With the right attitude you will achieve the preferred result.

With regards to dieting or losing weight we almost all know what we need to do. The problem occurs in not knowing how to put that knowing into good action.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment