The flash diet: why a picture’s worth a thousand pounds

January 31, 2017 Ashley 0 Comments

Ever get nauseated over everyone Instagramming their food?

Seriously, why would you wanna see a snap of my supper?

(“Um, I dunno… Maybe the same reason I’d wanna see a trillionth picture of your newborn doing nothing?”)

Well, according to some studies, your pals who are digitizing their dinner on the daily are likely doing it more for their own waistline than to waste your time. They aren’t filling up your feed with what they feed on to be vexing. Rather, it’s this approach called the “Flash Diet”. Never heard of it? Well, you know those people who post their workouts or send an accountability pal the caloric catalog of all they’ve eaten that day? It’s kinda like that. The idea’s that – even if you don’t bombard you buddies’ social media with whatever you’ve ingested; even if you just take a visual account for yourself – the guilt of straying from health will guide you back onto the path of making superior sustenance choices.

In fact, compared to those food diaries you’ve likely heard about, this method works even better. Why? Probably because it’s easier to fudge on the caloric count of that fudge when it’s just you retrospectively documenting dessert later on. By then, it’s just an abstract idea. An event that already happened. It’s easier to convince yourself that it wasn’t that much.

The details (thanks to denial) tend to become conveniently blurry.

“Did that label say 400 calories per cubic centimeter? Or four? (We’ll go with four…)”

With a picture, however, painful clarity returns to you with full force.

There’s no doubt. You can see it there in blazing, Kinkade-esque, Insta-filter hues – right down to the last high def detail. The chocolate. The shape of the icing. The size of it, seductively spilling off your plate like the top of an Elizabethan lady’s decolletage toppling from her corset. A picture’s unbiased and minus the lies. And that makes it far harder for you to lie to yourself – because the memory forces you to relive the experience of eating it. In a way, the whole process of morphing your meals into pictures is kinda like being your own private eye detective of the present – who comes to the guilty, criminal future-you later on with evidence in hand, and interrogation light focused on your face.

“Afta analyzin’ the spaghetti spatter pattern, we’ve concluded this meal was 1,000 cals – not 500 – dollface.”

And the studies seem to confirm this.

After an American study was performed on 43 flash dieters, subjects not only ate less, but they ate less of the bad stuff. And, compared to the food journalers, the incentive to eschew overeating increased significantly. One volunteer admitted, “I had to think more carefully about what I was going to eat because I had to take a picture of it.” Meanwhile, another did a double take on his double sized back of candies he’d snapped…and put it back: “I was less likely to have a jumbo bag of M&M’s. It curbed my choices. It didn’t alter them completely but who wants to take a photo of a jumbo bag of M&Ms?” Then, instead of negative, guilty feelings, one subject saw how he could improve his meals – what was missing: “I noticed that there weren’t too many greens in my diet, which means I should try to eat more vegetables and fruits.”

Now, that I love. Ya know, I just heard this hippie anecdote about how you get to decide what to take away from every experience. And, while I love that the awareness of overeating led some of these subjects to do less of the unhealthy habit, I love even more than some of them understood what they needed to do to eat more healthily – what they needed to add. (Versus just what they needed to take away.) But, while that’s all nice and feel-goody, you’re probably wondering: what’s the end result here? How much is a picture worth on the bathroom scale? What’s the weight loss end game? Glad you asked. Because, after that extended food photo shoot study was over, researchers noted three times more weight loss in those who documented their dietary proclivities than those who didn’t.

So, there you have it, vittle Instagrammers.

When all your other weight loss tactics’ve failed, start snapping all your snacks – for a picture perfect bod.