Thinking thin

Can one desire too much of a good thing?” Shakespeare asked four centuries ago in As You Like It. Yes we can, as the ultra-slim Barack Obama has often quoth in another context — and it can be beneficial too, we may add. Gone are the days when fantasising about food was considered sinful, as it stimulated a depraved craving for it. Now it seems suppression of such thoughts was more fattening than letting the mind gorge on fanciful feasts. If research showing that repetitive thinking about some food leads to a lower actual consumption of the said item proves to be true, then shedding fat is about to get a whole lot more enjoyable.

Greed is good, as Gordon Gecko once said — also in another context, of course — and now some are saying that it is slimming too. Tests that involved volunteers imagining they are eating candies or cheese cubes for long periods of time have shown that they had a markedly reduced desire for those items when told later to help themselves to as much as they want. However, imagining that they were wolfing down candies did not cut down their appetite for cheese cubes or vice versa. That, obviously , could prove tricky if a think-thin mantra is to be marketed to a wider public. Just imagine the amount of imagining they would have to do to turn themselves off the gamut of greasy goodies that come to mind when the stomach is empty....

Clearly, the broad principle that habituation reduces motivation — or that familiarity breeds contempt — has its limitations. Can thinking incessantly about bribery reduce the desire to bribe and be bribed, for instance? Nothing bears that out so far. So thinking oneself thin, without a concomitant moral belt-tightening , has a fat chance of success, whatever research says!