Originally published December 10 2014
Electric shock dieting method now made possible with new "Pavlok" electroshock bracelet
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) A U.S. company has created a wristband that aims to prevent wearers from overindulging. Call it a fitness braceless, if you will.
The device, called the Pavlok, can be activated manually or automatically via an app, according to Britain's The Telegraph newspaper. It is inspired from a theory developed by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who worked with dogs and trained them to expect to be fed every time he rang a bell. The Pavlok works in similar fashion; the wearer must avoid a certain behavior - such as overeating - or he/she will receive a small but uncomfortable electric shock.
Pavlok provides 'small amount of shock when you do stupid things'
"The idea is everybody has these things they know they shouldn't do," Maneesh Sethi, Pavlok's creator, told the paper. "If you start to add a small amount of shock when you do stupid things, you can mostly just increase the awareness of your activity in your daily routine. I like to say that for the last 1,000 years, we've tamed environment, but we haven't tamed ourselves."
Sethi went onto explain that, for example, someone who might be looking to lose some weight could deliver themselves a shock when their plate was half-finished, as an encouragement for them to end their meal. Or, he also said, if someone believed they were spending too much time on social media they could set up the device to deliver them a shock as a reminder to get offline and go do something else.
'We're held back by distractions'
The Pavlok developer told The Daily Dot website that activating the device manually could sound counterproductive, but he says his research showed that the self-applied shock is as, or more, effective than automatic shocks.
Having the device on your wrist "opens up the awareness of your habits," Sethi said. "It makes you ask yourself, 'Wait, why am I hungry again?'"
The device delivers a two milliampere shock, which the manufacture says is not excessively painful or dangerous.
The Pavlok is expected to go on sale as some point next year, and will retail for about $244.
"If there was one thing you could do, every day for a year, who would you become? Change is hard. We're held back by distractions, other people, and often ourselves," the company's website says of the device. "But change isn't impossible. Choose your daily action, and Pavlok will hold you accountable, ensuring lasting success."
E.J. Dickinson, an American journalist, wrote in The Daily Dot that she tested the shocking bracelet during her family's Thanksgiving meal; she set it up so that she would get a small shock if she was tempted to have second helpings.
'Hard to get someone to slap me'
"Is a shock therapy wearable necessarily the healthiest way of preventing overeating, or even obsessive-compulsiveness? Probably not," she wrote. "That said I'd be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little effective: Today, I was more than able to button each button of my trousers."
Sethi, who hired a woman to smack him in the face to prevent him from checking his Facebook account, describes himself as a "digital nomad," according to a report about his experiments in the New York Daily News, and he says his productivity soared from 38 percent to an astounding 98 percent when he hired slappers to keep him focused.
"It was surprisingly hard to get people to slap me without asking," Sethi told the Daily News with a chuckle.
Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
http://pavlok.com
http://www.dailydot.com
http://www.nydailynews.com
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