You can teach yourself to hate pizza and chocolate

Imagine that as soon as a piece of chocolate melts and flows down your throat, you start feeling nauseous, lightheaded, and run to throw up inside the toilet bowl.The goal is to make you ill every time you think about or encounter the problem food.

Will it work? It is the basis of the “false memory diet” pioneered by Elizabeth Loftus and her colleague Daniel Bernstein.The duo planted food aversions in peoples’ minds by playing a memory game with more steps in it.

People were asked to fill out a question naire about their favourite foods. A week later, they were told their answers had been entered into a computer which had done a complex analysis of their food preferences and could identify what their early childhood experiences with food must have been like. Participants were must have been like. Parti then told that when they were young they either “got sick after eating a hardboiled egg” or “felt ill after eating pickle.” Of course, this was a lie –there was no computer, and they had never got sick from eating pickle. Nonetheless, most participants indicated that they believed this feedback, and were able to picture their bad experience. When given another food questionnaire, they then reported liking pickles and eggs less and being less willing to eat them in the future. When the researchers offered eggs and pickle to the participants, they ate less of the two.

The same mind technique can also be used to make people eat healthy . For instance, you can get children to eat green veggies by planting false memories of positive food experiences. During the research, people who were given positive misinformation subsequently said they liked the healthy food more, rated a picture of it as more appetising, and were even willing to pay more for it.

Coming back to the weight loss plan, it is easier to give up foods that are high in meat or fat, and those that are slimy, for instance, hamburgers, butter and custard–all high-calorie choices.