Home > Work > Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
1 " The best diet is the one you don't know you're on. "
― Brian Wansink , Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
2 " There's only one thing that's strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit. "
3 " Suppose you found yourself two miles from home without a ride. Although you could get home three times faster if you ran, most people would settle for walking. Running wouldn’t be worth the sweat and discomfort, and walking will get you there at a reasonable and painless rate. Each step brings you a little closer, and before you know it, you are halfway home and still moving forward. It’s the same with mindlessly losing weight. It need not be a sweaty, painful sprint. It can be a slow, steady walk that begins with removing unwanted eating cues and rearranging your home, office, and eating habits so they work for you and your family rather than against you. These comfortable steps will add up—one or two pounds a month. Before long you’ll find yourself at home.The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on. "
4 " In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want. "
5 " People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period. "
6 " As long as we believe it is food that causes us to overeat, we are lost. Television, friends, and weather seem pretty unrelated to what we eat. That’s why they have such a powerful effect on us. "
7 " In one study, people who listened to a lunchtime radio mystery show ate 15 percent more than those who didn’t. The basic rule: distractions of all kinds make us eat, forget how much we eat, and extend how long we eat—even when we’re not hungry. "
8 " the idea of eating better is do-able. While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today. "
9 " Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you’re overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you’re sporting the same paunch. "
10 " People were almost twice as likely to reach for a comfort food when they were happy than when they were sad. "
11 " It’s about as close to an established fact as things get in the social sciences: People who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be overweight than people who don’t. "
12 " Beware of the health halo. The better the food, the worse the extras. People eating ‘low-fat’ granola ate 21 percent more calories, and those eating ‘healthy’ at Subway rewarded themselves by ordering cheese, mayo, chips, and cookies. Who really overeats—the guy who knows he’s eating 710 calories at McDonald’s, or the woman who thinks she’s eating a 350-calorie Subway meal that actually contains 500 calories? "
13 " 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. "
14 " Serving sizes start to make sense only when foods are individually packaged. "
15 " Yet the heavier a person was—American or French—the more they relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they relied on whether they felt full.13 "
16 " The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on. "
17 " Just as we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten simply by relying on internal cues, we can’t really tell how much we’ve gained or lost without some external benchmark. "
18 " While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today. Eating better entails small steps. "
19 " There’s only one thing that’s strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit. "
20 " But the real concern is with obese people. They typically underestimate how much they eat by 30 to 40 percent. Some think they eat half as much as they actually do.14 "