Love chocolate but afraid of getting fat? 2 Steps to Solving Your Chocolate Craving

After a hard day's work, your colleague hands you a chocolate. You, who are on a diet, can't help but struggle. You know it's high in calories and you're not hungry now. You just ate a large piece of chocolate yesterday, but don't people say that eating sweets can relieve stress? It wouldn't be too much to indulge once more, right? For those who have experienced similar struggles between inner and outer desires, a research result from Flinders University in Australia recently published in Appetite may be able to provide help.

In the elaborated-intrusion theory, scientists believe that the occurrence of craving can be divided into two stages, first as the intrusion of the desired object, and then as the elaborated mental imagery. The experimental results show that cognitive defusion and guided imagery can significantly reduce the subjects' craving for chocolate.

The authors say cognitive dissociation is intended to target the first stage of craving, when thoughts about chocolate begin to occur, while guided imagery targets the second stage of craving, when subjects begin to imagine what chocolate looks, tastes, and smells like.

The study was published in Appetite, Volume 113, Pages 63-70

This article is from ELSEVIER Global Pharmaceutical News