Weight Loss Tip #147 – Eat in front of a mirror to avoid binge eating

Once you get a routine in place and get used to exercising every day, hitting the gym and running is no longer that big a challenge. After all, your body has got acclimatised to doing more physical activities and you have realised that exercising is also a great way to blow off some steam after work. However, a far bigger challenge is monitoring your daily calories intake and actually sticking to your diet after a few days.

Don’t beat yourself up if you ended up binge eating your favourite snacks after eating healthy for three to four days. By being so hard on yourself, you will set off a vicious cycle of swearing off high-calorie food items only to go back to binge eating them. Needless to say, your erratic eating habits will only make it more difficult for you to consistently lose weight. Here are expert tips to stop binge eating.

One way to break this vicious cycle is to put up a mirror on the wall right in front of your couch, dining table and bed since these are the most common places where we eat our meals and snacks. So, how will a regular mirror help you to lose weight? Here’s what your munchies say about you and how to fix them.

A study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in 2015 found that watching yourself gorging on snacks like chips and chocolates will actually make your food appear less appealing and appetising [1]. This study included 185 college students who were divided into two groups. One group was made to eat in front of a mirror while the other group’s participants ate in a room without mirrors.

It was found that the participants who ate a chocolate cake in front of a mirror actually felt it tasted less tasty as compared to the ones who ate a slice of the same cake in another room. Interestingly, both the groups found no difference in the taste of the salad.

The researchers concluded that this was because the mirrors made the participants judge themselves for eating unhealthy food items. This way, the next time you watch yourself eating an entire packet of chips in the mirror, it might just make the experience a lot less enjoyable and evoke feelings of guilt and shame. You can also take full-length pictures of yourself to lose weight.

Reference:

[1] Jami, Ata, Healthy Reflections: The Influence of Mirror Induced Self-Awareness on Taste Perceptions (September 20, 2015). Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 1 (1), 2016

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