One thing I’ve learned from dieting is that willpower doesn’t work as a long term strategy. This article pulls from the research of Brian Wansink, of the “small plate movement,” to discuss how the myriad decisions we make about visibility, size, placement, surroundings, and color make a difference in how much we eat.
By adding more tools to our toolkit, we can stack the deck toward effortlessly reducing the amount we eat. This article summarizes some easy, do-able tips to translate the research to practice.
Brian is also the author of several books including Slim By Design – Mindless Eating Solutions For Everyday Life.
Two decades ago, Brian Wansink accidentally hit on a revelation that would change the course of his career: People with four tiny bags ate half as much as those with one big 440-calorie bag — and said they’d pay 20 percent more for snacks if companies sold them in smaller packages. “So here’s the punch line,” he says: “You can make more money by selling less food.”
We know far less about our own eating habits than we think. Wansink has found that we make many more decisions about food than we’re aware of — typically more than 200 per day. You don’t just choose whether to eat cereal or eggs, or even which cereal to eat. You also choose how much cereal to pour, how much milk to add, whether to finish the bowl, whether to have seconds. “There’s all these decisions that we don’t even code,” he says.
Want to eat well? Forget about willpower | Read more at Ideas at TED
