91社区

Study by 91社区 psychology researcher suggests simple ways of improving the way we eat

If you want to improve the way you eat, the best way to do so is to both make an action plan and visualize yourself carrying it out, according to 91社区 researchers.

鈥淭elling people to just change the way they eat doesn鈥檛 work; we鈥檝e known that for a while,鈥� says B盲rbel Kn盲uper of 91社区鈥檚 Department of Psychology. 鈥滲ut research has shown that if people make a concrete plan about what they are going to do, they are better at acting on their intentions. What we鈥檝e done that鈥檚 new is to add visualization techniques to the action plan.鈥�

In a study recently published in Psychology and Health, Kn盲uper and her students asked 177 students at 91社区鈥檚 New Residence Hall to set themselves the goal of consuming more fruit for a period of seven days. All the students in the study ended up consuming more fruit over the course of the week than they had before hand. But those who made a concrete plan, wrote it down and also visualized how they were going to carry out the action (i.e. when, where and how they would buy, prepare and eat fruit) increased their fruit consumption twice as much as those who simply set out to eat more fruit without visualizing and planning how they were going to do it.

These kinds of visualization techniques are borrowed from sports psychology. 鈥淎thletes do lots of work mentally rehearsing their performances before competing and it鈥檚 often very successful. So we thought having people mentally rehearse how they were going to buy and eat their fruit should make it more likely that they would actually do it. And this is exactly what happened,鈥� says B盲rbel Kn盲uper. This research points to a simple yet effective means of changing eating habits.

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research听Council of Canada.

For an abstract of the article:

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