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Losing weight is easy: we need only minor changes in our daily lifestyle, and not exhausting diets or thousands of daily squats, says nutritionist Brian Wansink.
Why are first world countries languishing in a real obesity epidemic? Not because we eat some “wrong” food and not because there is not enough physical activity in our life. Everything is easier. Judging by the results of recent studies, we simply eat too much.
Since the 1980s, the number of calories ingested each day has increased by 268 for men and 143 for women. This was enough to cause a stable increase in weight, since the daily energy expenditure over the past thirty years has not changed much.
However, this has long been known to everyone and is not at all surprising.
What is surprising is that it is possible to reverse this trend without depriving yourself of food and not locking yourself in the gym for the rest of your life. And no, this is not a low-fat, low-carb, high-natural magic supplement that will change your life in one week. It’s about psychology.
Read more:
- How to lose weight without noticing
Brian Wansink is a professor at Cornell University. His job is to investigate how we eat. The White House even appointed him head of the commission for the development of federal dietary guidelines. In addition, he is the author of two books: Mindless Food.1 and “Slimness through the interior”2.
In his research, Brian Wansink found that we start eating for a variety of reasons – but feeling hungry is not one of them in most cases!
How much we eat depends largely on what surrounds us. We pass not because we are hungry, but because of friends, family… The list is almost endless and just as invisible – we don’t think about the color of the label on the soda can, although the black makes it visually smaller, encouraging us to drink more.
In short, we are slaves of context. What we see around us turns out to be a much stronger incentive to eat than hunger itself. And Brian Wansink subtly and brilliantly proved it. (Side note: if you have a choice of who to believe: an experienced salesman or a psychologist when he conducts an experiment, choose a salesman!)
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- How to start a diet, achieve results and not “eat” others
For his experiment, Brian Wansink built “bottomless” soup bowls: a tube discreetly attached to the bottom was responsible for ensuring that (no matter how much soup you ate) the plate did not empty. Then he invited people to the table. And the people who got normal plates ate 450 grams of soup. Of those who got plates with a trick, one even managed to eat almost a kilogram.
The vast majority of people assessed how full they were, not with their stomach, but with their eyes: if the plate was not empty, they continued to eat.
But surely the subjects guessed that they had refillable plates? Nothing like this! Apart from a couple of people like the gentleman who ate about a kilogram, the subjects did not even say that they were full, although they ate 73% more than the owners of normal plates; no, they rated their satiety the same as the control group—after all, they only ate a bowl of soup.
In a series of experiments that followed, Brian Wansink showed that the amount of calories a person eats can be increased or decreased by 20% without him noticing. Brian Wansink calls this phenomenon “the mindless gap.” That is, you cannot distinguish 1900 calories from 2000, as well as 2000 from 2100. And depending on which side of the gap you are on, these 200 calories will result in four to five kilograms of weight lost or gained. We are slaves of the context that surrounds us, but this does not mean that we will not be able to use it. Brian Wansink’s Six Observations That Help You Get Slimmer.
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- Lose weight in four steps
Out of sight!
This does not mean that you should immediately throw out all those snacks, chips and sweets, but it’s a good idea to make sure that they do not catch your eye during the day. What we don’t see, we don’t think about. If we have a bowl of lollipops or chocolates on our table, we are distracted all day long by a heroic struggle with the desire to eat “well, just one small candy.” It is much easier to either hide the vase somewhere, or put something in it that will make you feel sick.
In addition, in canteens and restaurants with a buffet, slender people are three times more likely to sit with their faces away from food than overweight people. It also makes overweight people three times more likely to watch someone go for more french fries and convince themselves that this is normal behavior.
Already by one thing that is on our table in the kitchen (or anywhere else in the apartment), you can approximately predict our weight: fruits – most likely, you are a couple of kilos lighter than your neighbor, who does not have them. Cookies or chips – a couple of kilos heavier. Muesli – an extra 10 kilos. Soda – 12.
Well, okay, we hid the food, but you still have to get it at breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Read more:
- “Why do some people eat everything and don’t get fat, while others go on diets, go in for sports, but are still fat?”
For distant lands!
No, don’t mail roasts to Africa. Just make it easy for you to take the supplement. Do not put a saucepan, frying pan, cauldron, baking sheet and other large items of service on the table – leave it on the stove. This alone will reduce the amount of food eaten by 29%. Besides, remember those people in the cafeteria? Slender people sit 5 meters further than fat people.
Plan ahead
Slender people even choose food, as a rule, in a different way than overweight people: they don’t wander along the buffet, melancholy putting everything they like on a tray, but make a list of what they want to eat in advance, and only then go to the buffet. To a large extent, this rule applies to going to the grocery store – make a list of the food you want to buy in advance. Also, never, ever buy food on an empty stomach: no, you will most likely not spend more money, but you will buy unhealthy snacks that can be unwrapped and eaten right after the checkout.
Slower, even slower…
Fat people, chewing one serving of food, on average, make three chewing movements less than slender ones – 12 versus 15. In addition, the slower you eat, the less you eat – it takes the brain about 20 minutes after eating to understand that the body no longer needs energy. In modern life, our entire lunch can fit into 15. We suffer from this, because, throwing food into ourselves at great speed, we end up eating much more than we should – because the feeling of satiety still does not come.
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- Sugar – bad or good?
Diversity is not our way
Here’s another reason why the buffet is the enemy of slimness: we want to try at least a little bit of everything. But that’s not how it works. Research by Dr. Barbara Rolls of the University of Pennsylvania showed that if we were given a choice of three meals, we would eat 23% more. What follows from this? Brian Wansink suggests this solution: make sure that you never have more than two dishes on your plate at the same time. If you want something else, you can always get up and go for more. But the very need to get up and go (as well as the absence of a third course on the plate) will save you from overeating.
My friend is my enemy
We hardly think about it, but the amount of food we eat depends a lot on who we eat with. On average, if your meal is spent together, you will eat a third more than alone. Dinner with a big company? Most likely – eat twice as much as usual. Dinner for four is somewhere in between – an extra 75% of your average dinner.
Moreover: eat with a friend who is fatter than you? Eat too much. Are you served by a full waitress? Likewise. The most dangerous companion for us is a thin glutton. Why? Yes, because looking at him, we allow ourselves to eat as much as he does – “he eats so much, and he is thin, which means I can.” What if this is his only meal of the day?
Read more:
- “Healthy Eating” Leads to Obesity and Diabetes
So, there are many factors that affect how and how much we eat. What should be done to eat less?
- Change the environment: hide soda, put fruit on the table.
- Change the serving: leave only a plate and cutlery on the table – and go to the kitchen for everything else.
- Plan: first decide what you want to order / buy, and only then implement your plan. Never buy food on an empty stomach.
- Eat slowly. Each meal should take at least 20 minutes for the brain to realize that it is full.
- Bring uniformity to the plate. Put yourself no more than one or two dishes, for example, meat or fish with a side dish.
- Watch who you eat with. If you want to lose weight, it’s better to sit at the table alone more often.
And the last. Do not try to change everything in your life in one fell swoop. Nothing will come of it. No need to frantically rush to cancel dinner parties, hide sweets, make a shopping list for tomorrow and throw everything but two dishes out of the refrigerator at the same time. Brian Wansink noticed that those subjects who changed one or two, no more, habits, but changed forever and without exceptions for holidays, Sundays and hard days, received the greatest effect from the changes. Trying to take on too much is more likely to lead to failure. A significant part of our life goes on autopilot, but if we slightly adjust its program, it will take us exactly where we need to go.
See more at Time editions.
1 В. Wansink «Mindless eating: why we eat more than we think» (Bantam Book, 2007).
2 В. Wansink «Slim by design: mindless eating solutions for everyday life» (HarperCollins, 2014).