Is your home making you fat?
How your surroundings can make you eat more or less
In previous blogs, we have talked about willpower and we looked at how that is impacted by our mindless eating and how there are cues all around us that can tell us to eat more or eat less. So today we're going to talk a little bit about our food environment and how you can actually score your food environment using a kind of MOT system and how you can implement some changes from there.
As we’ve previously said, willpower is a limited resource and the more choices that you make that require willpower throughout the day, the more you will lower your willpower.
On average even though we only think that we make about 15, we actually make closer to 200 decisions a day about food and we can start to see that if we can minimise or reduce these decisions by designing our environment to help us make better choices then this can have a large impact on our weight and weight loss efforts.
We’re going to use research once again by Brian Wansink in his book called Slim By Design.
It is an excellent book but we’re just going to skim on some of the main points of this book for this blog but if you would like to know even more then you can go and check out this book.
“It’s easier to change your environment than to change your mind” - Brian Wansink
“Willpower alone won’t conquer bad eating habits for 90% of us” - Brian Wansink.
We all probably know this inherently as most of us will have started a diet with an intention and conviction to follow through and change our lives but after a while and after a period of hours, days, weeks and even months, willpower starts to get eroded and we start to either fall back into our old habits or we completely ditch the diet, however, fortunately, there are lots of innovative and proven solutions that can make us slim by design.
Instead of always trying to be mindful of what we eat 24/7 we can make small tweaks in the following:
In our home
Workplaces
Other areas such as schools, restaurants, supermarkets (the book covers this too)
We can make these small tweaks in these places in order to help us to eat less without having to think about it.
Giving your home an MOT
We're going to give you the tools here to do a home MOT to see if your home is setting you up for success or for failure because as we know from a previous blog, it appears that most people tend to “lapse” so they tend to eat food that they shouldn't do or eat more of it in their home and especially in the evening.
If you want to give yourself the best chance of success then we want to design your home to try and keep you thin, to keep you slim by design.
Also just a little snippet here and through some of the research that Brian Wansink has done..
“Women who left their breakfast cereal visible in the kitchen, weighed on average 21lbs more than their counterparts”. “Remember in sight, in stomach”.
Obviously it’s not going to cause you 21lbs if you start leaving your food out on the kitchen side however that was what was linked and that was the correlation simply because we know that the more that we see foods, the more tempted we are and the more that we think about it then the more that we lower willpower.
The same relationship holds true for crisps, crackers, cookies and soft drinks so there’s one of your first takehomes straight away and so if you go into your kitchen and you have lots of visible food on the sides then the first thing that we want to do is to try to clear it, however those that display fresh fruit and vegetables tend to be lighter roughly by 7lbs because again, in sight, in stomach.
Here we can start already thinking like:
As we walk into our kitchens are we setting ourselves up to eat junk food or to eat more bread because it’s on the side, to eat more cereal or more calorie dense foods or are we setting ourselves up to grab that fruit bowl or piece of fruit?
The first takehome which is the easy one as part of our example on how your food environment really can impact you is to declutter your kitchen top to keep food out of your mind.
What else can we do?
We’re going to give you a kitchen MOT so don’t allow your kitchen to become “empty” is one of the first things so by this we mean always try to have higher quality foods such as:
Higher protein snacks.
Ready to eat fruit and vegetables in the fridge.
This ensures that you’ve always got something that you can go and snack on because we know that if we tend to have nothing in the fridge then we’re going to reach for those lower quality foods that are potentially in the cupboards or order a takeaway.
Make your kitchen less loungeable - the more time that you spend in it the more you can think of food.
Some people often say that the kitchen is the heart of their home which is can be for a lot of families but we know that the more that you’re in an environment that is full of food the more that you’ll think of food and the closer that you’re sat to that food the more tempted you are and when we’re more tempted and we’re thinking about food more often we lower willpower and we eat more food.
This has been scientifically proven again and again, so if you can make your kitchen less loungeable so you actually want to be in there less so maybe you’d remove some seats or you take away the tv etc then you’re going to make it less likely that you’re in there more often and therefore not eating as many calories.
Make tempting foods invisible and inconvenient and we mentioned this in the mindless eating blog. It’s making sure that the really tasty foods aren’t at eye level, they’re not on the sides etc and they’re placed away in an inconvenient place that you cannot see so you’re not having to think about it.
Make healthy food more visible - you are 3 times more likely to eat the food that you see first than the food that you see 5th so think about this, the simple act of seeing a food first is going to vastly increase the likelihood of you choosing it and eating it so it makes sense that we place our calorie dense foods away “out of sight, out of mind” and we make the less calorie dense and the healthier foods such as our fruits and vegetables more visible to give us more chance of reaching for them.
Remove distractions i.e the television like we said earlier.
Conducting our MOT
To conduct the MOT of your kitchen and your house you’ll see that below is a tick list which is also what is featured in the book Slim By Design.
Click HERE
Basically you have got a checklist to tick off and the checklist is for the following:
The kitchen
The fridge
The freezer
The cupboards
The dishes
The pantry
The counters
The dining table
This is all scored out of 100 so you’ve got 100 points that you can try and tick off. If you tick them all then you get 100 and if you don’t tick any then you’ll get 0.
You can see on the checklist that for example: in the kitchen there’s no tv in the kitchen so you’d get a tick, there are no comfortable loungeable chairs so you’d get a tick there also.
One says that the walls are painted in a neutral colour so some of these things we’re not going to try to change over night or potentially will never change but that’s not the goal because no one is going to score 100.
On the first time the average is 20-30, however if we get a score less than 40 then this tends to mean that your house or your kitchen is working against you and it’s actually promoting you to eat calories mindlessly.
If you can get to over 60+ then it’s working for you. Don’t think of it again that you’ve got to be perfect as remember what we say, you haven’t got to be perfect, you’ve just got to be better so use it as a marker of progress and don’t feel like you have got to change everything over night because we can just change one or two things per week, for example:
Adding a visible fruit bowl to your counter
Over time you’re going to start moving towards that 60 so you can redo this MOT every couple of months just to see how you’re progressing but it can make an absolutely huge difference to the amount of calories that you subconsciously consume throughout a day.
Your workplace -
Once we’ve done our home MOT we can also do one for the workplace where we spend a lot of time when we’re awake.
In one study that Brian Wansink conducted was that the average office worker has 476 calories worth of food within their desk or at arms reach which is an incredible amount. This is definitely the difference between losing weight, maintaining weight or gaining weight.
When they went into offices and they asked people to empty their desks they had 476 calories on average, some people had up to 2,000 calories as they had chocolate bars, crisps etc stuffed in there and if you’re one of those people who have got those foods at your desk, we know that the closer that they are the more willpower that they’re going to use.
People who have sweets or chocolates on their desks were on average 15lbs heavier than those who didn’t and of course the people that put chocolates on their desks are potentially going to be eating more unhealthy food in general but we know that the more that we can minimise it, the more chance you’ve got of staying away from eating these types of foods so have a re-evaluation of your desk when you get to work.
Do you have food at your desk or in the drawers? If you do then remove it.
Where possible eat away from your desk, separate your work space from your lunch space. Lots of us in this busy world eat at our desk and once again not only does this blur the lines between where we eat and where we work it also distracts us because we’re working on spreadsheets, we’re replying to emails or we’re doing other tasks whilst we eat, which again we are always looking for the idea of how much we’ve eaten and what a portion size actually is because we’re very bad at doing it and by distracting ourselves we tend to eat more.
Prepare your lunch, we’re going to talk about this in the food preparation blog too but you are far more likely to make poor choices when you are hungry at work than when you are full at home. When you are full at home you can pack your nutritious lunches with your portion control guides or to your calorie budget and then take it to work and eat that food, however if you’ve had a stressful morning where you’ve lowered willpower and where you are then hungry and so you’ve had to make best of a bad situation in terms of what’s available to you, maybe there’s a cafe or vending machines but you’re not setting yourself up for success when realistically if we can just get in the simple act of preparing lunches and this could be mass preparing lunches so every Sunday you prepare 4 or 5 lunches for the coming week then we’re going to set ourselves up to consume the right foods.
I’ve given you a snippet there of the kitchen and the workplace but the book provides you with nearly 100 solutions so if you want to learn more then it’s a book that you could buy and it won’t only just help with your home and your workplace but also with your schools for your children, kitchens as well as restaurants.
Summary
Willpower alone is not enough and most of us have tried diets and failed and our food environment can be responsible for overconsumption of food mindlessly which is causing weight gain.
The more that we see and think about food, the more we consume it. We can however set ourselves up and design our environment to make it work for us and not against us, to make us slim by design.
Take the Slim By Design home MOT and see how you score to see where you’re at with it.
Over time work a plan up so that you can implement gradual changes and then retake the MOT in the coming months.
You don’t have to change them all, some of them are fairly drastic like reorganising your entire kitchen layout, painting different colour walls etc. This hasn’t got to be done but we can go for easy things to do which would give us 80% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
The main goal being to attain a score of at least 40 but if we can push for 60+ that now means that our food environment is helping us and not hindering us.