Fad Diet Series: The Vision Diet

Have you ever heard the expression, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” to describe someone who orders a lot of food then can’t eat it all? Well, it turns out that some people think that your eyes are the way to help you lose weight. The goal is to change the way you see your food so that you will change how you eat it. In principle, this is reasonable, but there are two approaches to this: one that might actually work, and one that absolutely does not.

Two Vision Diet Approaches

In the late 2000s, a Japanese inventor came up with the idea for the first vision diet. This diet is based on the principle that most foods that look appetizing are in the red/yellow spectrum, and that these colors are appetizing. That’s supposedly why most fast food chains use these colors in their logos. To counteract this in the vision diet, you are supposed to wear blue glasses that make your food look an unappetizing blue color.

A few years later, another Japanese inventor came up with another—more sophisticated—approach to manipulating food vision. Using a version of computerized virtual reality glasses, the inventor created a system that recognizes food objects and makes them look bigger. The thought is that if you make your food portions look bigger, you will get satisfied sooner and eat less.

Do They Work?

Based on reviews of the blue glasses, the ones truly known as the vision diet, there is no reason to believe that these actually work. Although they can cast a pale blue pallor over your food, this doesn’t seem to stop you from eating about the same amount as ever.

On the other hand, the vision glasses that change the apparent size of your food apparently do work. In experiments conducted by the inventor, people actually eat about 10% less when the food is made to look larger. In a different experiment, making food look smaller actually led people to eat about 15% more. So it seems that changing the apparent portion size of food does actually influence how much we eat. A 10% reduction in eating could be enough to create a calorie deficit, resulting in gradual weight loss.

Unfortunately, the only one of these glasses that is actually on the market is the blue pair, which are not at all effective.

If you are looking for a practical, effective, tested weight loss method, please call 303-586-3943 or email the Medfit Medical Weight Loss Clinic in Denver today.

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Dr. Angela Tran