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Eating Out of Our Minds 'Mindless Eating' author Brian Wansink wants to revolutionize how we don’t think about food and get trimmer and healthier while not doing it.  Image courtesy Getty Images To eat or not to eat. That’s the question we ask ourselves every day, consciously, of course, but in so many unconscious ways we can’t even count. Well, OK, we can count the ways; it’s 200, according to Brian Wansink, Ph.D., who just wrote about the American propensity for scarfing everything in sight in “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think” (Bantam Dell, 2006) The Cornell University Food and Brand Lab director has calculated how many food decisions we make daily through his extensive restaurant-style lab work. He’s determined that we’re so susceptible to fancy names for food, we’ll eat and drink more of it if it has a certain cache — no North Dakota wine for us, it’s gotta be straight from California to get our juices flowing. Or, take his “bottomless” soup bowl experiment. College students typically said they’d stop eating when the bowl was empty, or they’d eat half of it. Only 19 percent said they’d stop when they got full. Indeed, students whose bowls were surreptitiously hooked up to a soup-sucking hose ate much more soup than they thought. They kept accepting refills — and calories. Instead of dieting to lose weight and stressing ourselves out over what to eat and not to eat, Wansink’s prescription is to go right ahead and do it. Just know that you, the person who buys your groceries, food makers, advertisers and restaurants have been boobytrapping your ability to make healthy choices and manage portions. If we can arrange our lives, our kitchens and our carryout choices to a few simple rules, rather than a bunch, we can mindlessly eat our way to trimmer waistlines. Here, Wansink, 46, a married father of a toddler daughter, shares his insights: 
Q: Why are our waistlines getting wider each year? Every time we do a study, we tell people — show people — how much they’ve eaten. We may have changed the bowl size or moved the bowl closer. People almost always deny it happened to them. We realized that what trips us up were things we weren’t mindful of. Q: Do we ever put food out of our minds? We did a study earlier asking [subjects] how many food-related decisions they make during a day. We ended up finding it it was close to 200; we are just not aware of it. If you look at breakfast for instance, we make about 15 decisions before we even sit down to eat. First all all, we decide what cereal we’re going to eat. Then we decide how much milk to pour and whether it will be whole milk, skim milk or 2-percent. We decide if we’ll put a banana in it ... . Q: What is it about contemporary living that dooms our diets? There’s more freedom in our food world. We’re fortunate in that food is fairly inexpensive for most of us. That makes mindless eating easier. Food is less structured than in the 1950s, when we’d sit down for dinner at 5 o’clock and eat with the family. Q: What’s the role of portions sizes in our battle over bloat? We are no longer working for a living, so to speak. We’re sitting for a living, but we’re still eating farmers’ meals. Q: Nutrition experts always preach lifestyle changes to make any diet makeovers part of the way we live. How can we do that successfully? One thing is to make it gradual. If you binge diet, you’re just going to deprive yourself, and you’re going to feel disappointed. If you trim out 200 or 300 calories a day, that’s going to be the equivalent of two-thirds of a pound a week, 20 pounds over the year. The key is finding this mindless margin. You just want to rearrange your kitchen and your home so you automatically make mindless decisions. You don’t have to be obsessed. Q: With the popularity of diets and food diaries, and the constant institutional nagging over how fat we’re getting, how can we consciously yet “mindlessly” change how we eat? • Just think small. To consciously think this or that is a hassle. Just use small plates, small serving bowls and small packages. You want to make it inconvenient. Move a candy dish 6 feet away. People eat half as much when they have to [reach farther]. Keep serving bowls in the kitchen so you have to get up to get them. • Television: You have to turn it off. Eating while the television is on has a big impact on how much we eat: We overeat 35 percent more. People eat until the programs are over, and eat more and enjoy it less. • You can save a lot of money shopping at wholesale clubs, but there’s a tremendous danger of overeating. Break [bulk items] down into Baggies and smaller Tupperware containers so you have a smaller package. Q: Eating out is the new eating in, some say, as we spend nearly half of our food dollars – 46 percent – on restaurant food, according to the National Restaurant Association. Only a quarter of our food dollar was spent on outside food in 1955. As we dine out more, please describe what happens when we go out to eat. There’s a tendency when you eat with other people, you overeat. You wait for that person to finish. If you’re at a restaurant, you want to feel like you have some latitude and control over what you eat. But you have so many choices, from bread and appetizers, to entree and drinks. If you sit there with a friend you really like, the likelihood is you’ll end up overeating. Q: Since we’re collectively eating 70 million meals a year dining out, how can we do so without having it work against us? Use the Rule of 2. In addition to the entree, you can have any two items you want — an appetizer and a drink; a drink and dessert ... you can’t have three. That’s an easy thing to do so you don’t feel deprived. You can say ‘I can have a piece of bread if I want to, but I can’t have dessert.’ Most people will choose what they like better. Q: You describe five types of diet danger zones: The Meal Stuffer; The Snack Grazer: The Party Binger: The Restaurant Indulger; and The Desktop or Dashboard Diner. How did you identify these types? Over the years, we’d talk to people and ask what their situations are and where they were likely to overeat. [After studying them] we’d give them a little bit of detail. If nothing else, a person can see what diet danger zones they have and what they’re going to do about it. I’m a Meal Stuffer. One of the things I end up doing is I usually start eating and don’t quit until everyone else does. Now I make sure I’m the very last person to start eating. We always serve salads and vegetables family style. If I want more meat or pasta, I’ve got to get up out of my chair and get it [in the kitchen]. Q: You write about Gatekeepers, who can make or break your diet. Who are they are how dangerous can they be? It’s the person who does the bulk of the food shopping and preparing. The gatekeeper will control 72 percent of what their family eats, both inside the home and outside the home. In many cases, they control it for better or for worse. It’s for the worst when they buy or make a big batch of cookies and leave them sitting on the counter. It’s for the worst when gatekeepers don't give a child a snack to take to school; they’ll find something to eat that’s probably not healthy. Q: Is fast food the enemy? I eat fast food at least five times a week. All food has a place in our lives, we just need to change our approach. I’m definitely not the food police. You only need one or two rules a day. I’ll share french fries with a friend or throw half away. I still gotta hand my kid a french fry. You might have a rule to order fries just on weekends. All of us have our different rules for french fries. The worst thing is to say I can never have a french fry. Man, they’re good! Q: Are you trying to revolutionize how we eat, Dr. Wansink? That would be my dream. This is pretty much a mission for me to help people use food to do what they want to be. That could be thinner. That could be happier. It could be healthier. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it makes a big difference. |
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