Tempting food enhances self-control

While dieters often banish tempting foods from their kitchens, keeping some sweet treats around might be a good way to build willpower. All of us are often exposed to actionable food temptations like being offered chocolates or cookies by friends and non-actionable food temptations like a chocolate advertisement. To study how people react to actionable and non-actionable food temptations, researchers from Belgium studied female college students in a series of food experiments. The participants were told that a candy manufacturer was doing consumer research, which involved showing them pictures of the candies - a food temptation - they could not immediately eat, akin to seeing an ad for candy. Some of the women were also presented with a bowl of the candy and were told not to eat any - an accessible temptation they had to resist. Soon afterward, the study volunteers were confronted with yet another delicacy: a bowl of chocolate candies. It was found that women who had already been tempted by the forbidden candy were more likely than those who had merely seen pictures of that candy to exercise self-restraint for the mouth-watering food items. The above findings suggest that trying to remove all tempting foods from your daily life may not be the best weight-loss solution. It may be concluded that tempting foods help trigger a person's self-control strategies. However long-term studies are needed to prove that a little temptation truly is the best diet strategy.

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