Written by Catherine Saxelby
on Friday, 09 July 2010.
Tagged: eating mindfully, hunger, review
"Mindless Eating" is one of the best nutrition books I've read in the last few years. It was a real eye-opener for me - and I suspect for most of us - as it shows why you may not realize how much you're eating, what you're eating - or why you're even eating at all! It starts out by pointing out that everyone makes over 200 food decisions each day - but we have no idea why we're making them nor how we're influenced by the "hidden persuaders" around us!
According to the author, US eating behaviour expert Brian Wansink, what we eat is greatly influenced by powerful invisible factors such as who is eating with us, the size of the package the food is served in, product names and claims, room lighting, the proximity of food, and distractions of the external world. He tells us these are environmental influences that are beyond our conscious awareness.
This is not your usual boring diet book with Calorie-counted diet plans and exercise guidelines. It's more of a collection of research studies organised into 10 chapters. It could have been a series of dry academic reports. Instead it's a readable and (at times) irreverent book with clever drawings and self-help advice for the overweight. The research on why, how, what and when we eat is interesting and informative. You'll never look at movie popcorn the same way again!
The goal of the book is to help you remove those unconscious cues that trigger overeating and to re-engineer your environment and eating habits for weight loss. Dr Wansink calls these "Eating Scripts."
He recommends using the "Mindless Method" to promote weight loss by assigning proven solutions to our eating scripts to change bad eating habits into positive eating habits, mindlessly and without effort. For example, simple tactics such as keeping the lollies out of sight reduces the number you eat - as you have to make more effort to get up and get one.
"The best diet is the one
you don't know you're on."
This is a book that encourages small, almost effortless environmental changes to save 100 calories each day for slow and steady weight control. Called the "Mindless Margin", this represents a painless way of undereating which he thinks will work due to the fact that we are generally not aware of overeating or undereating by 100 calories. Shifting mindless 100-calorie overeating to mindless 100-calorie undereating is the key to success according to Wansink. This translates to his infamous quip: "The best diet is the one you don't know you're on."
His most famous experiment - and one I love to relate - is the "stale movie popcorn study," which showed that moviegoers consistently ate more popcorn - even stale popcorn - from a larger tub than from a smaller tub.
Wansink also did the "Super Bowl chicken bone study," which showed that leaving the chicken wing residue on the table (during the Super Bowl) acted as negative feedback, so that those with residue on the table ate fewer chicken wings than did those without residue on the table.
I found myself fascinated by his ingenious bottomless soup bowl experiment where he and his colleagues invented a soup bowl that secretly refilled itself, so you never managed to eat your way to the bottom. In Candid-Camera style, they drilled a one-inch hole right through a sturdy restaurant table when a waiter would ordinarily set a soup bowl. Then they drilled another hole in the base of a soup bowl to attach rubber tubing to it. This allowed them to secretly re-fill the soup bowl while the subject was eating it so it automatically kept refilling.
The results were as you may have guessed - people eating from the bottomless bowl ate and ate and ate, often eating three times more than normal without realising!
The message is simple - people don't listen to their stomach. They don't know when to stop. We see this time and again at buffets, yum cha restaurants and family dinners where food is on display in unlimited amounts.
Wansink has also shown that tall glasses look "bigger" than short squat glasses yet contain the same volume. And we consume more ice cream off large spoons than if we eat with small spoons. Menus are more enticing when restaurants use elaborate names and mouth-watering descriptions such as:
Seafood fillet | Succulent Italian seafood fillet |
Chicken Parmesan | Home-made organic Chicken Parmesan |
Hamburger | Gourmet beef burger with caramelised onions |
Carrots | Honey herb carrots |
Here are my pick of Brian Wansink's great insights to prevent mindless overeating:
I highly recommend Mindless Eating. It's a fascinating read about the hidden forces behind our food choices, and how easy it is to eat without thinking! Many of our current strategies for weight loss haven't worked to date and so the obesity problem persists. I loved this book and reckon we can do no harm by giving it a go. As Dr Wansink says: "It's a lot easier to change your environment than to change yourself."
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