Finished the book

Yesterday, I finished the book Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think. by Brian Wansink. I loved the experiments that they conducted. (I wonder if this guy needs a post-doc that is trained TOTALLY out of his field :-) ) Truly amazing and fascinating. What I also love about the book is that there isn't an emphasis on people needing to overhaul their lives to stop the progression of continual weight gain, they just need to change a few habits first. Baby steps. His main point is to figure out where we are accruing 100-200 calories through mindless eating and figure out what habits need to change to reverse or modify around those calories. His suggestion is to tackle just three habits for 28 days (as that's how long it takes to reverse a habit or make a habit) and check it off each night as you accomplished the habit.

Here are the three habits i'm going to focus on for the next 28 days
1) Snacks must got in a bowl or plate.
2) minmum 8 glasses of water (he doesn't talk about this too much, but I'm totally lazy about it and it's important)
3) Try to follow the 1/2 plate rule as much as possible...1/2 the plate are non-starchy veggies and the other half is divided into quarters....meat and starch. And if i'm in a situation where I'm not able to follow this idea then try the 20% rule...go for 20% less of heavy calorie sorts of food.

Even if you aren't actively looking to lose weight but you find that your weight at times will gradually creep up on you, this book is really good at explaining where some sneaky calories are creeping in when you aren't considering them as fully as you might think you are.

Check out this guy's website: http://mindlesseating.org/ it talks about some of their findings and stuff. Granted I'm totally facinated by all the experiments which is why I think this book is the coolest.