AMAZING book!!

I had read a review of this book in the nytimes the other day and after reading about a billion other book reviews I decided I wanted to have a 'look' at the book in person to see if I really wanted it. And when I went to the store today and started to read it...i knew i just had to have it. The book: Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think. By Brian Wansink.

Through a bunch of different experiments explained in this book, the author shows how we all mindless eat in different situations and shows how our environment or what we think we are eating is more of an influence on how much we actually eat. All the little food decisions we have to make sometimes will lead us to believe we are eating a lot less than we actually are and in the end we end up overeating.

OK I will admit this...I am a scientist (giggle), therefore I like ACTUAL experiments and ACTUAL data and percents that tell me HOW people are prone to overeat in certain situations. I think i've discovered that these kind of experiments would be really fun. (way more fun than my lame experiments that's for sure).

One experiment they gave people going to a movie theatre popcorn. Half the population got a BIG bag, and the other half got a medium bag. Now the 'trick' was that the popcorn was 5 days old. Someone afterwards described the popcorn as if they were eating styrofoam peanuts...basically it was really gross yet people still ate it. Two people actually forgot that they didn't buy the popcorn and tried to get a refund for the popcorn. The point being, the popcorn was gross. Yet even when the popcorn was gross people who had the BIG bag still ate more popcorn. They tested this in different cities, with fresh and stale popcorn and the verdict was the same. People ate more if they had more.

They've done TONS of different types of experiments showing how our decision making about food is largely influenced by how much we perceive we are eating which is has a lot to do with the environment we create while we are eating. He advocates that you can use the findings from this study to your advantage to pile in the good stuff and also use the information to limit the bad stuff.

I'm only 4 chapters into the book...here are a few tidbits that he's broken down from these studies.

Think 20% more or less.
Dish out 20% less than what you think you want when you are going for food...you probably won't miss it. But try to increase your veggie content by 20% more.

See all you eat
Put everything you think you want to eat on a plate before you start eating. Pre-plate your food.
Keep visual score of what you've eaten to remind yourself of what you've eaten. Dinners, snacks, everything.

Put your mega sized boxes of food in smaller boxes to dish stuff out of (like cereal) and pour into smaller bowls. Dish up your plates on smaller plates because it will seem like you are eating more.

The studies are really fascinating. And if you were to cut out 200 calories a day just by mindlessly avoiding them, that translates into 20lbs in a year. The book shows the subtle ways we "convince "ourselves to eat more bad stuff, but also shows how we can create "good" cues to eat the healthy stuff too.

I really am loving this book and I highly recommend it.