According to the researchers of Carnegie Mellon University, continuous thinking about eating a particular food, be it M&Ms or cheese, resulted in the study participants to eat less of the much desired food once it was presented before them. Researcher Carey Morewedge gave a description of the work and the implications it has on dieters.

Everybody knows that imagining and fantasizing about food can whet one’s appetite. However, the latest study has found that one has the ability to think their way into being satisfied.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon used M&Ms and cheese cubes in their study and discovered that simply by imagining eating a lot of something, the mind subconsciously restricts that food what it is later put into the mouth.

Carey Morewedge, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon shared some information about the experiment. He explained how they manipulated the studied people’s imagination and the amounts of food they imagined themselves to be eating.

The actual idea was to check if the people imagined eating the food first, or eating less of that food.

They found that people who imagined eating more food ate less of the same food offered to them later on.