This simple ritual will help you control your calorie intake

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

He looks ridiculous. But it works. Confirmed by research.

If you think about it, our life consists of constantly repeating moments. Morning coffee, brushing teeth, work, exercise in the gym - all these actions for us are a kind of rituals that we are used to. Psychologists say they help you develop good habits and make you feel in control of your own life.

Francesca Gino is a behavioral analyst and professor at the Center for Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Confucianism, which pays a lot of attention to them, is a kind of evidence that rituals help us become more disciplined. It is not surprising that Asians belonging to ritualized Eastern cultures have more self-regulation skills than people of Western cultures.

A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Chicago claim to have found a bizarre (and rather pointless-looking) ritual that can help lower your daily calorie intake. The results of their research are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and an extract can be read on the website.

Scientists have conducted an experiment among graduate students who want to lose weight. They all maintained the same physical activity in the gym, but the first half of the subjects ate as usual, and the second applied the ritual before each meal.

And although the ritual did not require the subjects to limit the amount of calories they consumed, and indeed, according to the scientists, it was invented by them at random, it had the expected effect.

Participants who performed the pre-meal ritual as a result consumed fewer calories (on average, about 1,424 calories daily) compared to those who ate normally (about 1,648 calories daily). In addition, the former also consumed less fatty foods and sugar.

So, here is the miracle ritual itself:

• Before you start eating, cut it into small pieces.
• Arrange the pieces symmetrically on a plate.
• Finally, press three times with a fork or spoon on each piece.

Does it smell like madness? But paradoxically, this ritual works. At least that's what the researchers say. True, there is a small drawback: you will not be able to control the volumes of absorbed soups with its help for quite obvious reasons. However, nothing prevents you from developing your own ritual for liquid food.