A Time magazine article in my Twitter feed caught my eye. It summarizes Cornell professor Brian Wansink’s six principles for eating less:
One: Don’t eat in view of food.
If you have cookies or chips sitting out at your house, you probably weigh eight pounds more than people who don’t. Those with breakfast cereal sitting in view typically weigh nineteen pounds more; those with soda sitting out weigh twenty-five pounds more than someone who doesn’t.
At a buffet, slim people are more likely to sit facing away from the food, while heavier people are three times more likely to sit looking at it. Watching other people eat causes us to think we need to eat more.
Two: Make food harder to reach. Keeping serving dishes off the table reduces how much men eat by 29 percent. Candy on your desk likely results in a double-digit weight gain.
Three: Plan ahead. Skinny people peruse the buffet before deciding what to eat; heavier people dive in and eat everything they don’t hate.
Four: Slow down. It takes twenty minutes for the “fullness signal” to tell us we’ve eaten enough, but the average American meal takes less than twenty minutes to complete.
Continue reading Denison Forum – Six psychological tricks for eating less
