Mindless Eating
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In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you're eating, what you're eating-or why you're even eating at all. • Does food with a brand name really taste better? • Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did? •
… More »In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you're eating, what you're eating-or why you're even eating at all. • Does food with a brand name really taste better? • Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did? • Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel? • How much would you eat if your soup bowl secretly refilled itself? • What does your favorite comfort food really say about you? • Why do you overeat so much at healthy restaurants? Brian Wansink is a Stanford Ph.D. and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. He's spent a lifetime studying what we don't notice: the hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat. Using ingenious, fun, and sometimes downright fiendishly clever experiments like the "bottomless soup bowl," Wansink takes us on a fascinating tour of the secret dynamics behind our dietary habits. How does packaging influence how much we eat? Which movies make us eat faster? How does music or the color of the room influence how much we eat? How can we recognize the "hidden persuaders" used by restaurants and supermarkets to get us to mindlessly eat? What are the real reasons most diets are doomed to fail? And how can we use the "mindless margin" to lose-instead of gain-ten to twenty pounds in the coming year? Mindless Eating will change the way you look at food, and it will give you the facts you need to easily make smarter, healthier, more mindful and enjoyable choices at the dinner table, in the supermarket, in restaurants, at the office-even at a vending machine-wherever you decide to satisfy your appetite.
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The best diet is the one you don't know you're on.
We all think we're too smart to be tricked by packages, lighting, or plates. We might acknowledge that others could be tricked, but not us. That is what makes mindless eating so dangerous. We are almost never aware that it is happening to us.
Our body's metabolism is efficient. When it has plenty of food to burn, it turns up the furnace and burns our fat reserves faster. When it has less food to burn, it turns down the furnace and burns it more slowly and efficiently. This efficiency helped our ancestors survive famines and barren winters. But it doesn't help today's deprived dieter. If you eat too little, the body goes into conservation mode and makes it even tougher to burn off the pounds.
We have millions of years of evolution and instinct telling us to eat as often as we can and to eat as much as we can. Most of us simply do not have the mental fortitude to stare at a plate of warm cookies on the table and say, "I'm not going to eat a cookie, I'm not going to eat a cookie," and then not eat the cookie.
In the hundreds of studies we've done on food, it became increasingly clear that the stomach only has three main settings: 1) Starving 2) I'm Full but I Can Eat More 3) I'm Stuffed
Eat before you shop, use a list, and stick to the perimeter of the store. That's where the fresh foods hang out.
We are hardwired to love the taste of fat, salt, and sugar. Fatty foods gave our ancestors the calorie reserves to weather food shortages. Salt helped them retain water and avoid dehydration. Sugar helped them distinguish sweet edible berries from the sour poisonous ones. Through our taste for fat, salt, and sugar, we learned to prefer the foods that were most likely to keep us alive.
It's hard not to feel the frustration of friends and family when their love of life is weighed down by having to estimate the calories in the the salad dressing they have "on the side," or in the baloney-thin slice of birthday cake they carefully cut. With more than 200 daily decisions to make about food, this much microthinking can joylessly grind a person down.
We can turn the food in our life from being a temptation or a regret to something we guiltlessly enjoy. We can move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.
The best part of a dessert is the first two bites.
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Add a CommentA book based on the researcher's own studies on food psychology. What makes us eat a little bit more? a little bit less? Providing young children with exposure to many foods and flavors is likely to prepare them for a healthier adulthood, as they learn better self-control. So many interesting ideas in this book, some have already been imbedded in the mainstream, others not.
Whether you want to lose weight, get your kids to eat more healthy food, throw a great dinner party or make smarter choices in grocery stores and restaurants, this book is full of interesting and useful information. This is an approach that works with human nature rather than against it. Highly recommended.
Boring book
Very few books cause me to take notes on it - there aren't that many out there to begin with. This was is such a book. Easy to read, informative, revealing, and organized. this book explains more about food than you think you even know. As it turns out, how we eat is greatly influeced by our environment - whether or not we know it. Plate sizes, eating company, and decor all affect how and what and how much you eat. But it doesn't stop there - there is much more to learn. And there are to do lists (meaning that the author clearly lists dos and don'ts at the end of each chapter that sums of the chapter and gives you directions of how to eat better today...right now). Diagrams make concepts easy to learn and use as well. Very well written. If you are looking to lose weight and get healthy, this book is a must.
Amazing and fun read. It's just amazing how we operate without ever considering what we are actually doing and end up eating Mindlessly all the time. I really loved the sense of humor the author had. It seems a lot of the experiments conducted, while had real implications, were often a lot of fun. One example was they left almonds on a desk for people of both normal and obese weight to see who would eat more almonds if the almonds were still in the shell. I wont spoil the surprise but one group would not eat almonds if they had to go through the effort of shell them. This book will open your eyes to the amount of calories we consume and don't even know it. I have no doubt that if you follow the suggestions in his final chapter and make small changes you will loose permanent pounds. Good read for anyone who is serious about changing their life and loosing those pesky pounds that Fab diets could never take off.
Great book to explore the idea of losting weight without the burden of going on a diet. Interesting studies that help one to see ways to control eating and lose weight.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book ... the research Brian describes helped me see areas where I am eating mindlessly. It was very easy to read ... now I'm using some of his tips to change my eating patterns... including the "mindless margin", which I know will enable me to keep my weight down without lots of stress, hassle and expense.