Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients—the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)
I haven’t tried any of this, but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don’t want to want to eat.
Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).
Single anecdata point—I quit smoking by deliberately causing myself to gag and think of vomiting whenever I saw or thought about cigarettes. It was very effective.
That’s… kind of extreme, but also sounds very effective. I’ve tried lesser methods against bad habits that aren’t quite as harmful as cigarette smoking, but they haven’t worked. I’m going to try your trick.
You need to actually induce gagging, to the point where your eyes water a little. I accept no responsibility if someone offers you a smoke and you vomit on them.
OK, gagging in exchange for quitting smoking sounds better than most deals Omega offers. Can I have some details about this? I.e., how long did it take, how much you were smoking before, how, where, and how often did you induce gagging, any other side effects. (For instance, does instant uncontrollable vomiting actually happen to you or was that just hyperbole?)
I did this a long time before I started reading lesswrong, the idea of doing it as an organized, self experimentation type thing didn’t even occur to me.
This was about five years ago so I can’t offer you much detail. I quit flat out, cold turkey. I think the gagging thing was most helpful in the initial two weeks when intense cravings where a problem particularly at parties etc. where people were smoking around me. I remembered to induce gagging I would guess about 1⁄3 to 1⁄2 of the time I consciously experienced a craving, which would have been dozens of times per day for the first week and far less over time. I did it whenever i caught myself thinking in any real detail about cigarettes, the taste, etc etc. One of my main reasons for quitting was were the queasy feelings upon waking—I’d remind myself of those general disgusted feelings, recalling as vividly as possible the unpleasant feeling upon waking up etc.
I have no idea which of the various things i did contributed to my success. I suspect developing the habit of physical exercise has been a big help because I find it impossible to run, swim or box if I have smoked in even the last week. I did relapse for a few months about two years later.
Instant uncontrollable vomiting definitely wasn’t a problem. I have a fairly low gag reflex, so I could gag a little to the point where I felt a slight response in my eyes and stomach muscles without worrying about actually vomiting, although for all I know this might increase the effectiveness of the technique.
My biggest caveat is that I had been truly addicted for at most a year and a half. It might not work so well for someone who’s been on the death sticks for decades. Particularly if it’s been entrenched into their routines.
Don’t do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.
Urging caution sounds wise, but I think it’s exactly wrong here. One’s goal in giving advice should be to alter others’ behavior in beneficial ways; people will probably tend to take fewer risks with emetics than is optimal (because they’re risk-averse, and vomiting is unpleasant), so your advice is in the wrong direction. Caution (higher significance criterion) is the act of increasing missed opportunities (false negatives) so that you take less wrong actions (false positives); this is a tradeoff.
This is analogous to how, for instance, the FDA kills more people by delaying medications’ approval than it saves by ensuring medication is safe before approving it.
All over this thread, people keep urging caution where my judgment is that they should be urging the exact opposite.
I would personally recommend against training your body out of finding particular foods pleasurable. Instead, I would recommend exploring alternative food combinations that satiate the same craving.
I.e., expand your palette rather than restrict it.
Also, mindfulness meditation can be useful here. I have a reasonable amount of anecdotal evidence (p ~= 0.7) that a lot of overeating problems center around focussing on the oral aspects of digestion rather than the gastrointestinal.
Remember that your stomach has enough neurons to make an entire second brain—a small one, but a brain nonetheless. Like any neural network, it needs training, and focus and attention are the best way to access it.
Sometime, sit down with a healthy meal with a reasonable amount of nuanced flavors (my particular favorite would be a vegetable stir-fry). Sit down and begin eating, and pay VERY close attention to your body. Don’t just pay attention to tip-of-tongue flavors; focus on the feeling of chewing the food, focus on how it feels going down your esophagus, and ESPECIALLY focus on the feeling of the food hitting your stomach. After every bite, see if you can actually detect the different neurological changes occurring in your stomach nerves—see if you can actually feel the moments when your food starts making your stomach say “YES! MORE”, the moments when your stomach says “hold on, gimme a minute to digest that one”, and the moment when your stomach says “okay, that was enough”.
When you’re hungry, really EXPLORE the feeling of hunger, especially the particular churnings of your stomach and the particular bits of shakiness in your limbs, the specific WAY that your head feels light-headed. See if you can notice nuances between different kinds of ‘hunger’.
Once you can perceive nuances in your ‘hunger’ sensations, see if you can find associations between those sensations and your reactions to different kinds of food. Really, really explore this. See if the “butterflies in your stomach” are helped more by starches or by proteins. See if the “jittery distractedness” is helped more by simple sugars or complex sugars. See if the “gnawing emptiness” is helped more by rice or by potatoes.
After doing this for about a year, you’ll start noticing amazing things. You’ll stop being hungry! Instead, you’ll start noticing that you have cravings, the way a pregnant woman might. Instead of being hungry you’ll say “God, I need an orange right now.” And when you eat an orange, you’ll suddenly stop feeling the craving—because your body was never hungry, it just really needed some vitamin C, and stuffing yourself until the craving shut down was never a healthy solution.
The first time I found myself craving broccoli and spinach I nearly flipped out—I never really LIKED those foods, and yet I desperately needed some fresh broccoli to chew on. As soon as I went to the store, bought a crown, and scarfed it down, I instantly felt better—after only a few ounces of greens.
This fits the general pattern of using life change events (like start/end of relationship, illness, study, job) to couple and combine with positive habit changes.
Tried. Don’t expect my results to be generalizable.
Once again, I have no reason to believe that same would happen to anyone.
In any case: Not many good medicines induce vomit. Most people who try it, use water, specially warm water, with mustard. This has all sorts of complications because mustard has a taste and a smell etc… nevertheless, no one in the pharmacy or wikipedia or friends who read pharmapapers had any other indication that would beat mustard water.
I wanted to stop liking chocolate. I waited for a while, so the organism would be sure it was not from lunch, and at dinner time I eat a lot of chocolate, and drank some mustard water. I kept looking at, smelling and thinking about chocolate, and would taste chocolate instantaneously after quickly swallowing the mustard water with my nose held.
It was obvious something bad was going on inside me, less than 10 seconds after the mustard. But my body is not a natural regurgitator. Long story short, I failed to even regurgitate. And now I can say that the weirdest meal I have ever had was composed of 120 grams of white chocolate, 100 grams of lindt milk chocolate, 100 grams of yellow mustard, 1,5 liter of water, and 50 grams of extra strong seedy mustard.
After that I started thinking about fighting for Monsieur Mangetout Guinness title for eating metals and glasses…
Thanks for actually trying this! I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac, which seems to reliably cause vomiting, but it’s hard to get in US pharmacies, and Amazon doesn’t sell it (except homeopathically). Did your friends say that mustard water works better than syrup of ipecac?
Another datapoint: I tried this a while back with mustard powder in warm water. I ate some chocolate, then downed around a cup of warm water with mustard powder (I forget how much powder it was). This was insufficient to make me vomit; I only felt slightly nauseated. I tried using my finger, wrapped in toilet paper, to agitate my uvula (the thing that hangs from the roof of the mouth behind the tongue). This made me gag, but not vomit. I tried again the next day, with the same results. I may have eaten slightly less chocolate after this, but I failed to develop any long-lasting taste aversion.
I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac before trying the mustard powder, but nobody sells it, not even online, except homeopathically—not even on eBay, or on sketchy chemistry-supply websites. It stopped being sold around 2005 because a review said that it’s not useful for curing poisoning. (Because vomiting doesn’t always get rid of poison, and it complicates the diagnosis. So the main reason isn’t that it’s bad for you, although it’s obviously bad for you too.)
I don’t think warm water and mustard make for a very good emetic. Next time I or someone else tries this, I think we should try the finger-in-mouth technique, together with syrup of ipecac (if that can be obtained), or smelling extremely powerful bad smells, or maybe warm saltwater.
I also looked around on pro-bulimia boards online (yes, such things exist), but they didn’t seem to have any ideas beyond what’s listed above.
Bad smells wont work since the pavlovian association will be with the smell. We have to do it through transcranial magnetic stimuli to the pons and Area Postrema, like they do in rodents. In rodents it works perfectly.
Anyone know how to do that? I’d be very happy to vomit in an EEG or FMRI
Is zslastman the someone you know who quit smoking this way, or can I count yours as a second data point? And if it’s someone else, can you give some details? This sounds like the best plan I saw on this thread.
Anecdotal evidence: I drank orange juice with m&ms when I was a kid, and it made me vomit. Since then I cannot eat/drink m&ms or orange juice without thinking about that, and the smell of the two makes me nauseous.
Less radically and more accessibly, adding a bitter ingredient seems to work (n = 1). Caffeine powder is cheap and bitter, but there are probably better options.
Any chocolate containing sucrose is very unhealthy, and that’s almost all the chocolate you’re likely to encounter unless you specifically seek out sugar-free alternatives. Pure cocoa may be healthy. Cocoa as it’s commonly prepared and served in candy and sweets is not.
It all depends on the context. If I just finished a massive weight lifting workout after a day of eating extremely low-carb, I’m going to need something to replace my glycogen stores. Even with that said, dark chocolate is still a high-fat food. According to the label the brand I’m eating right now contains 86% of my “recommended daily intake” of fat & only 6% of carbohydrates. Further, it provides one of the best fats for you—the saturated fat Stearic acid.
Starch can be converted to glycogen just fine, it just takes longer.
The only good reason I see to eat significant amounts of sugar is if I need an energy boost right now, ideally during exercise, though preemptive bread-eating reduces even that need. Active exercise also reduces the negative effects of eating sugar.
Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients—the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)
I haven’t tried any of this, but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don’t want to want to eat.
Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).
Bulimia studies might be a good place to start when evaluating the effects of such a program!
Single anecdata point—I quit smoking by deliberately causing myself to gag and think of vomiting whenever I saw or thought about cigarettes. It was very effective.
That’s… kind of extreme, but also sounds very effective. I’ve tried lesser methods against bad habits that aren’t quite as harmful as cigarette smoking, but they haven’t worked. I’m going to try your trick.
You need to actually induce gagging, to the point where your eyes water a little. I accept no responsibility if someone offers you a smoke and you vomit on them.
OK, gagging in exchange for quitting smoking sounds better than most deals Omega offers. Can I have some details about this? I.e., how long did it take, how much you were smoking before, how, where, and how often did you induce gagging, any other side effects. (For instance, does instant uncontrollable vomiting actually happen to you or was that just hyperbole?)
I did this a long time before I started reading lesswrong, the idea of doing it as an organized, self experimentation type thing didn’t even occur to me.
This was about five years ago so I can’t offer you much detail. I quit flat out, cold turkey. I think the gagging thing was most helpful in the initial two weeks when intense cravings where a problem particularly at parties etc. where people were smoking around me. I remembered to induce gagging I would guess about 1⁄3 to 1⁄2 of the time I consciously experienced a craving, which would have been dozens of times per day for the first week and far less over time. I did it whenever i caught myself thinking in any real detail about cigarettes, the taste, etc etc. One of my main reasons for quitting was were the queasy feelings upon waking—I’d remind myself of those general disgusted feelings, recalling as vividly as possible the unpleasant feeling upon waking up etc.
I have no idea which of the various things i did contributed to my success. I suspect developing the habit of physical exercise has been a big help because I find it impossible to run, swim or box if I have smoked in even the last week. I did relapse for a few months about two years later.
Instant uncontrollable vomiting definitely wasn’t a problem. I have a fairly low gag reflex, so I could gag a little to the point where I felt a slight response in my eyes and stomach muscles without worrying about actually vomiting, although for all I know this might increase the effectiveness of the technique.
My biggest caveat is that I had been truly addicted for at most a year and a half. It might not work so well for someone who’s been on the death sticks for decades. Particularly if it’s been entrenched into their routines.
Ok, so you didn’t smoke-then-gag, just gagged when you thought about smoking. Thank you.
Well, you should. It’s a good thing. :-)
Don’t do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.
The theories about which foods are unhealthy keep changing, and you might find out that you personally need something which has be called unhealthy.
Urging caution sounds wise, but I think it’s exactly wrong here. One’s goal in giving advice should be to alter others’ behavior in beneficial ways; people will probably tend to take fewer risks with emetics than is optimal (because they’re risk-averse, and vomiting is unpleasant), so your advice is in the wrong direction. Caution (higher significance criterion) is the act of increasing missed opportunities (false negatives) so that you take less wrong actions (false positives); this is a tradeoff.
This is analogous to how, for instance, the FDA kills more people by delaying medications’ approval than it saves by ensuring medication is safe before approving it.
All over this thread, people keep urging caution where my judgment is that they should be urging the exact opposite.
I would personally recommend against training your body out of finding particular foods pleasurable. Instead, I would recommend exploring alternative food combinations that satiate the same craving.
I.e., expand your palette rather than restrict it.
Also, mindfulness meditation can be useful here. I have a reasonable amount of anecdotal evidence (p ~= 0.7) that a lot of overeating problems center around focussing on the oral aspects of digestion rather than the gastrointestinal.
Remember that your stomach has enough neurons to make an entire second brain—a small one, but a brain nonetheless. Like any neural network, it needs training, and focus and attention are the best way to access it.
Sometime, sit down with a healthy meal with a reasonable amount of nuanced flavors (my particular favorite would be a vegetable stir-fry). Sit down and begin eating, and pay VERY close attention to your body. Don’t just pay attention to tip-of-tongue flavors; focus on the feeling of chewing the food, focus on how it feels going down your esophagus, and ESPECIALLY focus on the feeling of the food hitting your stomach. After every bite, see if you can actually detect the different neurological changes occurring in your stomach nerves—see if you can actually feel the moments when your food starts making your stomach say “YES! MORE”, the moments when your stomach says “hold on, gimme a minute to digest that one”, and the moment when your stomach says “okay, that was enough”.
When you’re hungry, really EXPLORE the feeling of hunger, especially the particular churnings of your stomach and the particular bits of shakiness in your limbs, the specific WAY that your head feels light-headed. See if you can notice nuances between different kinds of ‘hunger’.
Once you can perceive nuances in your ‘hunger’ sensations, see if you can find associations between those sensations and your reactions to different kinds of food. Really, really explore this. See if the “butterflies in your stomach” are helped more by starches or by proteins. See if the “jittery distractedness” is helped more by simple sugars or complex sugars. See if the “gnawing emptiness” is helped more by rice or by potatoes.
After doing this for about a year, you’ll start noticing amazing things. You’ll stop being hungry! Instead, you’ll start noticing that you have cravings, the way a pregnant woman might. Instead of being hungry you’ll say “God, I need an orange right now.” And when you eat an orange, you’ll suddenly stop feeling the craving—because your body was never hungry, it just really needed some vitamin C, and stuffing yourself until the craving shut down was never a healthy solution.
The first time I found myself craving broccoli and spinach I nearly flipped out—I never really LIKED those foods, and yet I desperately needed some fresh broccoli to chew on. As soon as I went to the store, bought a crown, and scarfed it down, I instantly felt better—after only a few ounces of greens.
Note to self: If I ever have chemotherapy be sure to either only eat foods I already don’t like or eat foods that are unhealthy but tasty.
This fits the general pattern of using life change events (like start/end of relationship, illness, study, job) to couple and combine with positive habit changes.
This seems very valuable. Will try, and try to remember to post results.
Tried. Don’t expect my results to be generalizable.
Once again, I have no reason to believe that same would happen to anyone.
In any case: Not many good medicines induce vomit. Most people who try it, use water, specially warm water, with mustard. This has all sorts of complications because mustard has a taste and a smell etc… nevertheless, no one in the pharmacy or wikipedia or friends who read pharmapapers had any other indication that would beat mustard water.
I wanted to stop liking chocolate. I waited for a while, so the organism would be sure it was not from lunch, and at dinner time I eat a lot of chocolate, and drank some mustard water. I kept looking at, smelling and thinking about chocolate, and would taste chocolate instantaneously after quickly swallowing the mustard water with my nose held.
It was obvious something bad was going on inside me, less than 10 seconds after the mustard. But my body is not a natural regurgitator. Long story short, I failed to even regurgitate. And now I can say that the weirdest meal I have ever had was composed of 120 grams of white chocolate, 100 grams of lindt milk chocolate, 100 grams of yellow mustard, 1,5 liter of water, and 50 grams of extra strong seedy mustard.
After that I started thinking about fighting for Monsieur Mangetout Guinness title for eating metals and glasses…
Thanks for actually trying this! I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac, which seems to reliably cause vomiting, but it’s hard to get in US pharmacies, and Amazon doesn’t sell it (except homeopathically). Did your friends say that mustard water works better than syrup of ipecac?
Does this mean you still like chocolate?
The White chocolate bar was 170 grams. the other 50 I ate the next day. Delicious, as always.
Another datapoint: I tried this a while back with mustard powder in warm water. I ate some chocolate, then downed around a cup of warm water with mustard powder (I forget how much powder it was). This was insufficient to make me vomit; I only felt slightly nauseated. I tried using my finger, wrapped in toilet paper, to agitate my uvula (the thing that hangs from the roof of the mouth behind the tongue). This made me gag, but not vomit. I tried again the next day, with the same results. I may have eaten slightly less chocolate after this, but I failed to develop any long-lasting taste aversion.
I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac before trying the mustard powder, but nobody sells it, not even online, except homeopathically—not even on eBay, or on sketchy chemistry-supply websites. It stopped being sold around 2005 because a review said that it’s not useful for curing poisoning. (Because vomiting doesn’t always get rid of poison, and it complicates the diagnosis. So the main reason isn’t that it’s bad for you, although it’s obviously bad for you too.)
I don’t think warm water and mustard make for a very good emetic. Next time I or someone else tries this, I think we should try the finger-in-mouth technique, together with syrup of ipecac (if that can be obtained), or smelling extremely powerful bad smells, or maybe warm saltwater.
I also looked around on pro-bulimia boards online (yes, such things exist), but they didn’t seem to have any ideas beyond what’s listed above.
Bad smells wont work since the pavlovian association will be with the smell. We have to do it through transcranial magnetic stimuli to the pons and Area Postrema, like they do in rodents. In rodents it works perfectly.
Anyone know how to do that? I’d be very happy to vomit in an EEG or FMRI
Is zslastman the someone you know who quit smoking this way, or can I count yours as a second data point? And if it’s someone else, can you give some details? This sounds like the best plan I saw on this thread.
Anecdotal evidence: I drank orange juice with m&ms when I was a kid, and it made me vomit. Since then I cannot eat/drink m&ms or orange juice without thinking about that, and the smell of the two makes me nauseous.
Be careful about using this! I have a sneaking suspicion that my car-sickness resulted in an aversion to cars.
Less radically and more accessibly, adding a bitter ingredient seems to work (n = 1). Caffeine powder is cheap and bitter, but there are probably better options.
Umm.....… but caffeine is also addictive. This seems like a flaw in the plan.
I have heard of bitter nail polish for people who want to stop biting their nails.
Why would I want to stop eating chocolate?
I don’t think anyone should want to stop eating dark chocolate, but white & milk chocolate are fairly unhealthy.
Any chocolate containing sucrose is very unhealthy, and that’s almost all the chocolate you’re likely to encounter unless you specifically seek out sugar-free alternatives. Pure cocoa may be healthy. Cocoa as it’s commonly prepared and served in candy and sweets is not.
It all depends on the context. If I just finished a massive weight lifting workout after a day of eating extremely low-carb, I’m going to need something to replace my glycogen stores. Even with that said, dark chocolate is still a high-fat food. According to the label the brand I’m eating right now contains 86% of my “recommended daily intake” of fat & only 6% of carbohydrates. Further, it provides one of the best fats for you—the saturated fat Stearic acid.
Starch can be converted to glycogen just fine, it just takes longer.
The only good reason I see to eat significant amounts of sugar is if I need an energy boost right now, ideally during exercise, though preemptive bread-eating reduces even that need. Active exercise also reduces the negative effects of eating sugar.
Might want to rethink the bread. Gluten irritates the GI tract & increases gut permeability, which can lead to inflammation & autoimmune disorders.
[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonulin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16635908
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1326203/