Trying to lose weight? Try staring at randomly changing squares

This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006

Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings.

I've attempted to reproduce the type of display these researchers suggest may distract you from your cravings (click on the image to start the animation).

The original research, however, didn't take into account whether participants were hungry. Perhaps if you're already hungry, the visual distraction won't help.

Danielle Steel teamed with two of the original researchers, Eva Kemps and Marika Tiggemann, to determine if visual distractions were still effective when participants were hungry. In this new experiment, they divided 42 female college students into two groups. One group was required to avoid eating for four hours before participating, while the other group was asked to eat immediately before participating.

Each participant was then asked to name the three foods they craved the most (the most popular foods were pasta and chocolate). Next, the computer prompted them to visualize one of the foods they listed for 5 seconds. They were asked to maintain that image for a further 8 seconds while they watched either a dynamic visual noise display like the example above (but with 80 rows and columns of squares instead of my 10), or a blank computer screen. Then they provided a rating of how intense their craving for the food item was. This was repeated for each food, with both the dynamic display and the blank screen. Here are the results:

While cravings were more intense for hungry people than non-hungry people, in both cases, people who attempted to maintain the image while viewing the dynamic noise display reported significantly lower craving levels. So even when you're hungry, simply viewing a distracting visual display may reduce your food cravings. This experiment also added to the earlier results by showing that visual displays can reduce cravings for the particular foods people crave, not just an arbitrary food provided by the experimenter.

So, will this work for you? Here's my attempt at clumsy replication of Steel et al.'s study. First, visualize the food you crave the most. Think about it exactly, putting a picture of it in your mind. Spend several seconds thinking about exactly what that food looks like. Now, try to maintain that image while watching the dynamic noise display I created.

Now, report your results in this poll:

Steel, D., Kemps, E., Tiggemann, M. (2006). Effects of hunger and visuo-spatial interference on imagery-induced food cravings. Appetite, 46(1), 36-40.