Is Mindless Eating The Secret To Weight Loss?
In Mindless Eating, Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University who has studied consumers’ food-related decisions for decades, focuses on the sort of gradual, modest weight loss that is achievable. Declaring that “the best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on,” he urges small changes in everyday behavior that over the course of a year can result in a weight loss of 10 to 25 pounds. His book will not be much help to people who generally want to lose 50 to 100 pounds.
Enter Brian Wansink. He’s all about little changes that add up over time. He concedes that the body resists big, sudden movements in weight. “It’s estimated that over 95 percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back,” he writes. “Deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against then; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.” Wansink’s recommendations, which are derived from his research on the cues that lead people to overeat, are designed to achieve the loss of up to half a pound a week, which he says is below the threshold that would trigger a metabolic response. He urges readers to use “the mindless margin”—the 100 or 200 calories a day they would not really miss if they gave them up—to gradually move toward the bottom of their weight ranges.
Even if you have no interest in following Wansink’s advice, the book is worth reading for his breezy, entertaining accounts of Candid Camera–ready studies in which people stuff themselves with stale popcorn because it’s in a big container, keep slurping soup from a surreptitiously replenished bowl, or eat more in restaurants because of music, menu language, or the ostensible origin of a complimentary glass of cheap red wine. Wansink’s overarching point is that, when it comes to food, we’re not paying attention. “It takes up to 20 minutes for our body and brain to signal satiation,” he notes, and Americans often finish their meals in less time than that. Instead of internal signals we rely on external cues to tell us when we’re done: Is the plate clean? Is everyone else done? Is there more in the serving dish?
To counteract such cues, Wansink recommends such tactics as using smaller plates (which make portions seem larger), keeping serving dishes in the kitchen (which discourages second helpings), replacing short, wide glasses with tall, thin ones (which make drinks seem bigger), keeping food scraps and bones on your plate (which reminds you how much you’ve eaten), and dividing snacks from big packages into smaller bags or plastic containers (which discourages you from devouring the entire package). Wansink, who wants readers to know that he “enjoys both French food and French fries each week,” advocates eating more mindfully, to increase enjoyment as well as to improve nutrition. But he thinks it’s unrealistic to expect people to constantly count their calories in the face of the myriad food-related decisions they make each day. In his view it pays to plan ahead, in effect tricking yourself into eating less.
Wansink, for his part, says labeling and education don’t make much of a difference, and “we cannot legislate or tax people into eating Brussels sprouts.” Although he has spent much of his career studying ways in which businesses encourage people to buy, he recognizes the limitations of these techniques and does not portray them as inherently sinister. “Do food companies put ingredients in their food that they know we will eat and love?” he writes. “Absolutely—they are guilty as charged. So is your grandmother.” Wansink emphasizes consumer self-help rather than protection from conniving capitalists. A chapter called “The Hidden Persuaders Around Us,” a phrase that echoes the title of the 1957 Vance Packard book that portrayed advertisers as insidious manipulators of desire, is mostly about tricks people can use to avoid eating mindlessly. Instead of remaking the world to discourage overeating, Wansink says, “we can reengineer our personal food environment to help us and our families eat better.”
Source: Reason
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