Food Porn

The white loaf lies seductively on the marble of the kitchen counter, showing off its beautiful crust to its best advantage under the subtle lighting. It sends out its heady fresh baked smell, simply irresistible just like the Sirens in ancient Greece. Butter could not longer stop itself and with the help of knife it spreads itself shamelessly over the soft white slice and with a shutter of ecstasy melts into the delicious crumb……………………………

STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP

That’s the kind of film that is running in my head when I start feeling hungry or deprived and am not on top form. The worship of food – I am sure a lot of people do it. I often hear people talk about the foods they will finally allow themselves again when the diet is over. It is like hero worship the way they, I, think and talk about their favourite food. I can not trust myself at present to have a loaf of fresh bread lying around the house and just have a slice of it. So I ban it entirely and start day dreaming about it. The kind of food porn I am capable off can have me actually salivating. No surprise that I can find myself very quickly in the shop and leave with the coveted food plus some appropriate toppings. The more I run the movie, the more I can make myself believe that I want it, need it AND deserve it.

There are some NLP techniques to stop this kind of thing happening, to disassociate myself from the hero item in question. They involve running the movie in my head and making the item smaller and further away and black and white. That never really worked for me – I found a quicker and more effective method which I think I heard described in a television series with Paul McKenna of ‘I can make you thin’ fame (a title I greatly object to – I will talk more about the program he developed in another blog).

I have adapted it and call this method ‘poor the spittoon over the food porn’ and that is literally what I do. Every time I start thinking about a food or beverage item and begin to obsess about it I imagine a spittoon that stood for a while outside a Wild West Saloon, it has got lots of spit in it, you know big chunky bits and chewing tobacco and it is so full that it slightly swaps over every time somebody walks past it. I mentally dip the food or drink I am thinking about into it. Just like magic I stop thinking about the item – I have been doing it for a week now and it has worked every single time.

Anything the grosses you out works, the more colourful and realistic you can make it in your head, the better it will work with your food of choice. You can use anything you do not like, something bad smelling, something rotting. What turns your stomach?