Mindless Eating
Having done our primer on willpower we’re going to start moving into food environment and how the choices and all of the signals around us can actually make us eat more than we actually realise subconsciously so have that idea in your head that willpower is a limited resource and can be depleted throughout the day.
The average person believes that they make 15 food related decisions per day when in fact it’s actually closer to 200, this is mindblowing! If I asked you to think about in your head now how many decisions you make, some people might say “well I decided to have chicken instead of beef for tea”, “I had cheerios instead of porridge for breakfast” and when actually the decisions are:
“Should I have an extra portion?”
“Should I have 200ml of milk or should I have 180ml of milk, is that enough or should I have a little bit more?”
“Should I have an apple?”
“Should I have a diet coke?” “No I’ll have a regular coke, but should I have a large or a small coke?”
These above are some examples of some of the decisions that people can make in the day but on average people make 200 decisions a day regarding food on average.
Lots of these decisions are made subconsciously and as such we can become mindless eaters so actually as we said, people may be conscious of 15 of these decisions but actually 200 of them are made throughout the day therefore a large majority of our decisions that we make on food are at a subconscious level and we are influenced by our environment on a subconscious level.
When we think of this and the impact of ego depletion and willpower, well if you’re making 200 decisions a day and 200 times a day your food environment and the environment that you find yourself in is telling you to eat more then it’s no wonder that you are struggling to stick to diets or you’re struggling to live or engrain a healthy lifestyle so what we’re going to do over the next 2 blogs is to really help you set yourself your environment so whether that be at work or at home, school etc, to set you up for success because if over 200 times a day you’re having to fight your environment to not put on weight, to not eat unhealthy foods or to eat more of those unhealthy foods then it’s no wonder that we struggle and we fall of our diets.
Luckily Professor Brian Wansink has done hundreds of studies into this very topic and a lot of the information that we’re going to talk about is from his book on Mindless Eating and if you want to go into it into more detail, well it’s quite a user friendly book that you can pick up and buy.
The mindless margin
For many of us weight gain is insidious and it happens very slowly over time so over a number of years as nobody really wakes up one day and says “oh wow I’ve gained 10 stone overnight” as this isn’t going to happen. People tend to gain 20-30 lbs over the course of 5-10 years and it’s done very slowly on a day to day basis.
This can often be due to what we call the mindless margin because why do we overeat when sometimes we’re not even enjoying the taste of food?
They’ve done studies where people have literally eaten stale popcorn simply because it was a bigger tub and they we’re kind of told subconsciously to eat more and why do we eat to the point of feeling unwell or even when we are not hungry?
We basically overeat because there are signals and cues all around us that tell us to eat.
Some examples here are:
The size of the container that we eat from - the bigger the container that you eat from the more likely that you are to eat more and this all comes down to that most of us are as we’ve said before with our portion control blog, some people are very bad at realising what a normal size portion is so we look for cues in our environment and in our packaging to tell us what is normal, so when we have a small packet, our body tells us that a normal size serving is far less than when we have a large packet like a family size pack. We tend to overeat because our body isn’t too sure what a normal size serving is.
The size of the plate that you eat from - the larger the plate because when the plate is larger the size of the food looks smaller and the serving size looks smaller so it kind of tricks your brain into thinking that you’re eating less food yet actually they’ve shown that when people replace big plates for smaller plates they actually eat a significantly less amount of food and that’s all subconsciously as their brain registers that actually I’ve had two plates of food even if they’re very small plates compared to very large plate and we’ll actually talk about this more in our food environment blog as well.
The signage of the marketing of products - we tend to buy 30-100% more when any sign with a number is used to sell a product. How crazy is this?
Even if it was not even just from the 30% off but anything that’s got a number on the signage we tend to overbuy by 30-100% more and then so when we see these ‘buy one get one free offers’ or ‘30% off’ and we stock up on these foods, we then tend to consume these foods at a rate of double than we would do normally, so let’s just say that Pringles are on offer, 2 for £2 and so you buy those Pringles and you never normally have them, well for the next week we tend to eat them at twice the rate that we normally would so once again, just seeing that sign in the supermarket at the end of the isle, you’ve picked up those two tubes of Pringles and not even thought about it because it’s subconscious, you’ve put them through the checkout, it’s then in the cupboard and you will overeat them by double the amount that you normally would as everything around us is telling us to eat more.
The mindless margin
The reality is that most of us have absolutely no idea at the end of the day if we have eaten 200-300 calories more or less and if you were to eat between 200-1800 calories well most of us will have no clue how much we have actually had.
This is the mindless margin -
It’s that 100 calories above or below so 100 calories above is a surplus so eating more calories than we’re burning so we’d be gaining weight and 100 calories less is a deficit so we’d be gradually losing weight. If we go to extremes of this scale and if you’re eating 1000 extra calories a day then you’re soon going to be putting on weight and if you ate 1000 calories less per day you’re going to feel very hungry but there is a grey area and these blurred lines within the middle where actually we’re not too sure if we’ve just overeaten or if we’ve just undereaten.
So the very simple strategy here is the 20% rule which is basically where we dish out 20% less food than we think that we will want to be full at the end of the meal and often we normally overestimate this anyway and overeat so by putting 20% less food on your plate well then when you cut out say 20% of the pasta that you’d normally have replaced it with more vegetables or/and fruit. What have we actually done here?
We’ve actually just taken away calories because we know that pastas and potatoes etc have more calories per gram than fruit and vegetables do so that really simple rule of when you’re plating up your food, plate up 20% less food than you’d normally have to think that you’re going to be satisfied and replace it will fruit and vegetables. You won’t miss that 20% but it’s a very easy way of creating a deficit in that mindless margin.
The forgotten foods
We know about this when it comes to under-reporting and it’s that most of us are bad at keeping accurate tracking of how much we eat throughout the day.
Without some sort of external cues, it’s very hard to know if we’ve actually overeaten so a good example here was a study that they did with chicken wings which were where they had students eating chicken wings and one time they took the plates away so again they had no real reference of how many chicken wings they’d had and another time they left the plates on the table so the participants could see if they’d had one or two plates of chicken wings etc.
They found that when they left the plates on the table so then their brain had some sort of register of how much they’d eaten that people actually ate 28% fewer chicken wings when they’d left the plates with the bones on, on the table because it served as a reminder of how much they’d eaten.
So a little tip here is:
To see it before you eat it.
When people pre-plate their food before eating, they tend to consume 14% less compared to having smaller amounts and going for seconds or thirds, so when you’re at a buffet or maybe when you’re at a friends house etc and there’s food around the table, plate up the first time how much food you think that you’re going to want to eat to be satisfied. It’s been shown that you will naturally eat 14% less than if you make shuttles back into the kitchen etc as you’ll have a small plate then take it back into the kitchen then have another small plate etc so see it before you eat it.
Scores of studies have shown that we eat the same volumes of food on a daily basis and so we’re actually looking for a bit of consistent volume so we’re looking for a consistent amount of food to sit within our stomach therefore if we can replace some of that volume from higher calories to lower calories then we’re going to lose weight.
If we look to replace high-calorie food for low calorie, high volume food then we can almost ‘trick’ ourselves into eating less. This is where food quality comes in, for example with your fruits, veggies, protein.
The same holds true for the speed of eating, the more distracted that we are and the faster that we eat then the more that we eat.
This is where it comes into being mindful when we eat, so how many of us eat at our desk and/or we go to eat our tea in front of the tv etc so all of the time we’re listening to music, doing work etc and all of the time we’re distracting our brains away from how much we’ve actually eaten, however, if you can sit down, in a quiet place for 10-15 minutes and really kind of savour each mouthful, let it go down and really register how much you’ve eaten then you will find that you often eat far fewer calories and this is done in a very mindless way in terms of it takes very little willpower to actually just listen to your body a little bit more.
The tablescape
Think of this as how you set up your table and the instruments that you use as when it comes to your plates, your cups and where you actually place your food it has a real impact on how much that you actually eat. As we have mentioned with the size of the packaging and the bigger the packaging then the more that you eat, well so does plate size and variety so as we said the bigger the plate the more that you eat but also the more variety that you’re given as well. Think back to when you’ve gone to an all that you can eat buffet and because you’ve got around 20 options of food then you tend to overeat compared to if you only had 3 or 5 options.
When using larger packaging people on average tend to eat 20-25% more than with smaller packages.
Let’s think about this, if you are currently eating 2,000 calories and you can cut that down by 400-500 calories per day simply by eating from smaller packets instead of getting the family size bag of crisps or a normal size pack of Oreo’s and instead you buy the little small pack then that is giving your brain an idea of what a serving size is so then if we did this we’d tend to eat 20-25% less.
A study looked into this at a parent-teacher association meeting and whilst watching a 10-minute video the parents were given either a large bag of M&M’s which was 1lb and in the other group they were given a normal bag of 1/2lb.
The parents watched this 10-minute video and they found that the group that was given the large bag of M&M’s on average ate 137 M&M’s as opposed to the other group who had the smaller bag of M&M’s as they ate 71 M&M’s.
This equated to 237 calories so simply because they were given a larger bag they consumed 237 calories more, so again what we should be thinking now when we’re going shopping is if there are certain foods that we like and enjoy as a part of our diet then how can we split them up or buy them in smaller packets so we know exactly what a serving size is and so we’re not tricked into mindlessly eating more than we normally would so, therefore, we could look at the size of the package to also tell us what a normal size serving is.
If we are using bigger plates and bigger spoons then this is normally telling our brain that a portion serving size is bigger.
If we look here at this contrast principle:
If I asked you which of the 2 orange dots is the biggest, most people would say it’s the one on the left but if you’ve done this before then you will know that actually the 2 orange dots are exactly the same size, however because of the contrast of the circles on the outside the orange one looks far smaller.
This is how it works for food as if you have a very large plate then the food on your plate will look small, however if you’ve got a small plate the food on your plate will look far more and your brain will actually subconsciously think you’ve eaten more therefore you will consume fewer calories.
When you are looking for dishes and when you are going somewhere like Ikea to buy some cutlery etc look for smaller dishes and smaller plates.
This was also shown in an ice cream study. The first thing that they did was that they had large bowls vs small bowls when people were getting themselves ice cream.
The people that were given the large bowls served themselves on average 31% more ice cream which is quite a lot more ice cream as it was ⅓ more and this equated to roughly 127 calories so we know that the size of your plate affects how much that you eat.
The next thing that they decided to ask was well what about the utensils that you use so they decided to use either a normal size scoop or a larger scoop and so the group that were given the large bowls with the large scoop ended up eating 51% more ice cream than the group that was given the small bowl with the small scoop and this equated to roughly 212 calories.
Let’s think about that now, a simple act of having a larger bowl with a larger scoop made them overeat by 200 calories and when you add that up over a couple of meals and you add that up over the course of a week, a month, a year then there’s going to be a huge difference in the amount of weight that these people are carrying simply because of their utensils so if there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s not just the size of your plates, it’s not just the size of the packaging or the size of your utensils, it’s that your body is always looking for norms, it’s looking to be told what a serving size is so if you can find any way of making it feel smaller then you’re going to help yourself.
A real life case study here is actually Alan Sugar as Sir Alan Sugar (The Apprentice) well he was quite notorious for carrying around a teaspoon in his top pocket because it was a small utensil so he’d have to take more bites and it would also take him longer to eat and this was actually one of the easiest ways that he used in order to lose weight and instead of carrying around and using big knives and big forks he always carried around a small teaspoon as it slows down your eating and you have smaller portions per scoop and he actually lost weight this way.
It’s not just plates, so again the contrast principle here:
Which line is longer?
The horizontal or the vertical?
As we look at this, the vertical looks longer however they are both exactly the same size and so when we actually drink from short glasses like tumblers we tend to drink 77% more than we do with tall glasses.
Set the tone and serve yourself when you’re eating on smaller plates, use smaller knives and forks and also use tall thin glasses because if we think and say that there’s roughly 40 calories per 100mls in a Coke as well as alcoholic beverages, well if we’re using our tumblers regularly then we’re going to be over-serving by nearly 4/5ths everytime we have a drink whereas if we have the tall thin ones it appears that there’s more therefore we tend to consume less.
These are things that I find interesting as these cues are absolutely everywhere that are telling us to eat more and also the fact that just saying move more, eat less is just quite rubbish advice for people most of the time because we’re in this environment that’s always telling us to eat more, however if we can start to control our environment that we’re in then we can become aware of mindless eating, we can become aware of under-reporting and aware of our ability to reduce our NEAT levels when we exercise and then now we can start to have some tools that we can use to help us in our weight loss journey.
As I mentioned before:
Variety - everytime we increase the variety of food, we increase how much everyone eats and it just tends to happen at buffets and all social situations so the more variety that you have, the more that you’re going to eat and this is where everything in moderation cannot be a great thing for some people because then they do want a bit of everything, however if we limit your choices to 3-4 or 5 instead of 10 then we know that you’re going to eat less.
There was another ice cream study that was done where they used different flavours of ice cream and they compared consumption of ice cream when 1 or 3 flavours were served.
When 3 flavours were served people ate 21% more ice cream and again this comes down to that idea that we’ve said about before in the sugar blog and it’s that taste is sensory and appetite specific so you might have filled up on 1 flavour of ice cream and then that’s it, your body says that you’ve had enough, however if you switch from vanilla to having a bit of strawberry to then having a bit of chocolate then you could probably go back and eat a bit more vanilla because there’s difference in that taste, so again a very easy way/a mindless way of helping yourself to lose weight is actually looking to limit some of your food choices and sometimes opting for some of the more blended choices because you wont eat as much.
Limit your options when eating out or at social events, so if you know that you’re going to a social event you may say to yourself “I need to limit my foods from 2 or 3 dishes” and that is all that you’re going to eat from.
If we use our rule of 20, then you’ll only plate up 80% of the food that you think that you’re going to want to eat and you’ll replace the rest with salad, you’ll also use small plates and tall cups and then that’s a very easy way of mindlessly eating less in social occasions, at work lunches etc.
The hidden persuaders
Hidden persuaders are the cues that encourage you to eat more and the more visual or on display a food is, the more we eat because we think about it more.
Remember that temptation that we talked about in the willpower blog, the closer that the M&M’s were to people, the more that they were tempted and the more that they had to use willpower.
A study showed this nicely in which they used secretaries as their participants and for some reason they were used a lot for these sorts of things, they must have been really easy to get hold of in Brian Wansinks lab.
In the study they placed a candy dish on the desk of these secretaries and one day the dish was clear so they could see the sweets inside so this then increases temptation.
On another day the dish was white so you couldn’t see through it so it was hiding the candy but they knew that it was in there.
When the clear dishes were used they ate 71% more candy which was only 77 calories a day but if you think, if you do this every single day throughout the week then we’re looking at 400-600 odd calories and far more calories than you would do simply by having a white candy dish and then if we add this up to all of these little things that we’ve been talking about, well it makes a big difference.
The huge take home here is: if you want to take away some of these hidden persuaders, these things that are telling you to eat more then get it out of sight.
The easy fix is to make healthy food easy to see: i.e a fruit bowl. By putting this fruit bowl at eye level and the junk food in cupboards away on its own.
By putting all of the fresh food that you want to eat at eye level when you open the fridge, on your counter etc.
All junk food is placed into one single cupboard and placed in the most awkward cupboard that you have in your kitchen because if you have junk food in 5 different cupboards then there’s a good chance that everytime that you go to a single cupboard that you’re going to see some junk food and again what are we going to do, we’re going to have to say no we don’t want it and we’re going to have to use some self control, however if we can go into 9 of the 10 cupboards in our kitchen without seeing junk food that is going to help us mindlessly not eat anymore.
The thing to remember here is ‘out of sight, out of mind’. ‘Insight in mind’.
As much as you can with any food, get it out of the way.
The main take home here is have a look at your food environment. Are you constantly tempting yourself even if it’s subconsciously with food and what can you do to get it out of sight and out of mind?
To combat this we can use something that's called “designing for laziness”, so like I mentioned before putting your junk food all in one cupboard but actually we can go a step further.
Below is a study to show about how the “designing for laziness” can have an impact.
They took another secretary study and they put chocolates randomly assigned to 3 different locations.
On day 1- Chocolates were placed on their desks very close - high temptation.
On day 2- Chocolates were placed in the drawer, so they were still close and the secretaires could still get them quickly but they were out of sight so there was a slightly lower temptation.
On day 3- They put the chocolates 6 feet away, further across the room. Now this doesn’t mean that all of the secretaries had them in this order, for example someone on day 1 might have had the food 6 feet away but on day 2 they had the chocolate on their desk where as somebody else had the chocolate on their desk on day 1 so it was randomly assigned, it wasn’t done in that order.
On average, when the chocolates were on the secretaries desk, they ate 9 chocolates. When they were in the drawer so when they were close to them but they couldn't see them so therefore less temptation they ate fewer and then even fewer when they were 6 feet away.
This is very compelling, once again to say that the closer and more tempted that we are by food, the more that we’re going to eat.
The reason why they believed that this worked and like we said there’s less temptation but it also provided the secretaries with a chance to consider “is this in line with my goals?”.
A lot of the time if we’ve just got sweets and chocolates on our desk, we’ll just almost eat them subconsciously without even thinking about it. I mean how many of us have watched a film with a bag of maltesers or think of your favourite snacks and by the time that you’ve realised it, you put your hand into the bag and you’re rummaging around trying to find the rest of the chocolates and you’ve eaten them all and you’ve almost done it on a subconscious level but actually having the food 6 feet away gave the secretaries time once they’d stood up and started walking towards the chocolates to consider “actually do I just want a chocolate or am I eating it because I can see it and actually is eating a chocolate in line with my goals?”.
If we’re going to design for laziness we’re going to put this junk food and the foods that we don’t want well out of the way.
One of the extreme cases which a gentleman did was that he took his junk food and he placed it on the highest shelf in his garage so if he really wanted junk food he actually had to go out to the garage, he had to get his ladders then get on the ladders to get up to get the junk food out and then come back down which often enough would give him time to consider that actually he didn’t want it and he wasn’t going to go and get those calories but better yet don’t have it in your house.
If you are one of these people that gets in from a hard day and you know there’s chocolates in the fridge and you go to the fridge and you eat that chocolate well this could hinder on your weight loss etc but if that chocolate isn’t there in the first place then it’s a bigger step to then get in your car to drive to the shop to buy some chocolate to then come back and I’m not saying that some people won’t do that but the chances of you doing that regularly are far less so look around your food environment and ask yourself are you encouraging yourself to eat bad foods in the evenings by having it around and by having it in the house or can you buy just enough in individual sized packets that’s going to be placed in an inconvenient place for you to get to and this is going to naturally mindlessly help you eat less of this junk food.
The next one in our hidden persuaders is food offers. We’ve talked about these before so it’s offers such as:
50% off
Buy one get one free
12 packs for the price of 8
People who stockpile food during the first week eat these foods at twice the normal rate and this is also going to be a huge source of added calories that we don’t even think about so therefore protect yourself from these impulse buys by writing your shopping list at home, shopping on a full stomach so that you don’t go there hungry and buy the foods that are naturally impulsive to you or better yet do online shopping as online shopping can be a great tool because then you can’t go and see those extra special offers that are on the end of the isles etc.
Walk down your supermarket and you will see on all of the end of the isles that it always tends to be offers for junk food because they know that it’s going to catch your eye. You will also notice that the most expensive products that they want to sell you are at eye level and the ones that they don’t want to sell you as much are on either the top or the bottom because they know that the foods that you see most often are going to be the ones that you desire the most so save yourself from this if you can and go with a shopping list, with a full stomach and if you can’t then shop online with pre-planned shopping lists.
This is all only skimming the surface but if you want to know more then you can buy the following book:
Mindless eating. Why we eat more than we think by Brian Wansink.
Hopefully this blog has given you an idea of how much there is to it when it comes to the fact that it’s not just the case of you wanting it enough or that you haven’t got enough willpower, there are so many cues, there’s 200 decisions a day on food, everything from the packaging to where you place your food to the size of your plates that you eat off all control how much your actual body is being told to eat or not so if we can set ourselves up in the perfect food environment ‘quote on quote’ that’s actually telling us to eat less then we’re going to need less willpower which is going to make the whole dieting process far easier but just to summarise:
We make far more decisions about food than we actually think that we do and remember it’s closer to 200 than 15 and most of which are subconscious.
We want to mindlessly eat less so use the 20% rule. Replace 20% of your plate contents of carbs or fats with vegetables and pre-plate 80% of the food that you think that you want on one plate and don’t go back for seconds or thirds.
Eat high volume, low calorie foods.
Eat in a non-distracted state and take your time as the faster that you eat, the less chance you’ve got of actually registering hunger signals and you’re going to eat more and the more distracted that you are by work, by children, by tv etc then again the more that you’re going to eat so if you can eat undistracted.
Keep unhealthy food out of sight, away from you so that you’re not tempted and better yet do not have it in the house or in the environment next to you.
Design for laziness - make it hard to get to those foods.
Very practically use smaller plates and serving utensils as well as tall glasses to mindlessly eat less.
When eating out limit your variety so don’t have a bit of everything, let’s get it down to 2 or 3 plates.
Shop with a pre-written list to stop impulse buys.