Close Your Eyes and Eat Less

One of the teachings of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) is that thoughts are composed of seeing, hearing, taste, smell, and feeling sensations. And, when someone seems stuck in an undesirable behavior or response, it can be simply because they have not used all of their senses in the situations where those undesirable behaviors occur. Or, maybe they left out the resources of one of the senses that would be particularly useful in that situation.

One way of thinking about it is that we have different resources associated with each of the senses. That may seem rather abstract, but maybe a simple example will bring it down to earth and make the idea clear.

A great many of those who are overweight decide when it's time to stop eating by using visual cues. They will stop when the plate's empty, for example. They are not using the body's feelings of fullness as a signal to stop when they are full, so they tend to overeat regularly.

A simple way to test this idea is to simply eat a meal with the eyes closed. Pay attention to the feelings of fullness or satisfaction in the stomach, and stop when there is a feeling of fullness. Typically, there is a substantial amount of food left on the plates of overweight people who try this little experiment.

Simply shifting from visual cues to feelings of fullness to determine when to stop eating can make a dramatic difference in the amounts of food eaten. Of course, it takes a little practice to shift into using the feelings as the stop eating signal, but it's actually quite easy to do.