Can't stop eating? Try pretend food

A new study finds that imagining eating actually helps people eat less.

In experiments at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reported in the current issue of Science, when people imagined themselves eating candies or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.

This mental dieting sounds bizarrely counterintuitive, because we're all familiar with the opposite phenomenon: thoughts of food that make us more eager to eat it.