Diet Glasses: The Future of Weight Loss?

If your eyes are bigger than your stomach, then perhaps the best way around this, is to make your food look bigger. Japanese researchers at the University of Tokyo, have recently hit upon a way to make food look bigger than it actually is, in order to make people feel fuller after eating less. Nothing can replace exercise and a diet with low fat and low sugar foods, for losing weight.  However sometimes we clever and lazy humans like to cut corners; and losing weight is something that requires effort and exertion.    Diet GogglesThese augmented reality 'diet goggles' digitally enlarge items of food to make them appear bigger than their actual size. This visual trick is supposed to stop people from gorging on food. When users look at the food item, everything around it, including the hand is the same size.

The potential to revolutionise the dieting industry has yet to be explored.  They are still a long way off creating a commercially viable product. The diet goggles can only work with simple shaped objects, so something like a banana couldn't be resized.

Another complicated issue is whether or not a person wearing the glasses, who is aware that they are eating something digitally enhanced, will always respond by eating less?  Professor Hirose from The University of Tokyo believes that fooling two or more of the senses is a way around this.

Meta Cookies

Meta cookies are another project for Hirose and his team.  Goggles give plain old biscuits the flavour of many other things, again through tricking the mind. The goggles cover both the nose and eyes. An augmented reality marker is stamped on top of the biscuit and interprets it as looking a certain way.  Plus the smell of a certain flavour is pumped into the nose at the same time.  

The biscuit has only one taste, but the mind uses this visual and smell data to say otherwise.  For people strapped for cash, this could be the perfect alternative an expensive night out eating lobster. Maybe one day our children will stay in, eat a plain old biscuit and be perfectly satisfied with the experience!

Realistic?

It will be incredibly interesting to see whether or not these diet goggles will take off, and indeed, where they will be available for consumers at large. Regardless of the outcome, this is yet another technological advancement that can't help but amaze millions of people all over the world.

Athena blogs about all things health and lifestyle for leading glasses retailer DirectSight.