Rachel Herz

“One potential solution for maintaining pleasure while limiting intake comes from recent evidence that a reduction in the motivation to eat a specific food can be induced without ever going near the real thing. Imagine that you are really craving buffalo wings. Now imagine a plate of twenty wings in front of you, all hot and crispy and dripping with buttery hot sauce. Now imagine eating the wings one at a time. Go through the whole sequence in your mind—picking up a drumette or a wingette and biting into it, going through your personal routine for stripping every juicy piece of meat off the bone—and then imagine doing this another nineteen times. By the time you’ve finished this mental exercise, your buffalo wing craving should have severely dissipated, and if a basket of buffalo wings were offered to you right now, you’d eat fewer than if that basket had been plopped in front of you the minute you started wishing for them. What you’ve just experienced is how you can make food less appealing using only your imagination.”
― Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food

“Sadly, the failure rate of diets is a whopping 95 percent. After a major weight plunge, most people gain back all the weight they have lost within five years, and many gain it back with interest. Indeed, in a study of 19,000 healthy men the best predictor for weight gain over a four-year period was having been on a weight-loss diet beforehand.”
― Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food