Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

Great book, for those who want to know how the "diet" industry is out to make you fail, and how the food industry sets us all up for failure. For those who feel they have no power over anything. . .take your power back over food and healthy eating, and be verbal about it!!!

The biggest thing I came away from Dr Wansink's with is an understanding that we don't stop eating because we're no longer hungry. By now recognizing and paying attention to the "external cues", and by implementing a few of the gimmicks that Dr Wansink has pointed out, I have managed to easily cut down on some of the junk food that I had been consuming. This book would be very valuable to anyone responsible for planning a families meals.

Do you know how much you are eating and why you eat what you do? You probably don't but this book can help you learn. It also offers easy to follow practical advise on how to control and reduce what you eat.

The author is a psychologist who studies eating. His work is mainly aimed at restaurants and food manufactures. They use it to learn how to present food in the way that will help them sell more. This book uses some of that same research to help us consumers learn to understand why we eat more then we think we do and what we can do about it.

Mindless Eating is well written in a friendly style. The information is presented as stories about the different experiments the author and his collaborators did. Wansink manages to avoid getting bogged down in the details that are required for scientific papers and does not use the condescending preaching style that many diet books end up using.

Unfortunately the style gets to be repetitive and predictable after awhile. Some of the stories were just too cute by the end of the book. I would have appreciated more variety in the narrative style.

Mindless Eating is not aimed at the seriously obese, it is more useful for those who have been slowly gaining weight over the years without really noticing. Wansink manages to convey a lot of interesting information in a fairly short book. He provides some practical advise that you will probably not find elsewhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. I have started loaning it to other friends because I found the information very useful.

"Mindless Eating" informs readers why they are typically conditioned to, without thinking, eat more than they realized. People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Almost any sign with a number promotion leads us to buy 30-100% more than we normally would. Losing over 1/2 lb./week triggers a metabolism slowdown that undercuts much of the value of the diet.

Cutting out our favorite foods is a bad idea - cutting back on how much is mindlessly doable. In most studies people can eat 20% less without noticing it. We eat the volume of food we want, not the calories. (Fill your plate with leafy vegetables; drink extra-whipped smoothies - more air.) Strategies include see all you eat - don't go back for 2nds and 3rds. Increasing the variety of food (eg. a buffet) also increases eating - even if it is only increasing the number of colors in an M&M bowl. Leftovers suggest you probably made too much and ate too much as well. Put healthy foods in a visible container (will eat more) and bad foods in a covered (invisible) one.

Visual cues (eg. passing a 7-11 store, viewing an ad for soup) create more eating. Eating with other encourages greater eating - unless you're already a heavy eater, then it encourages eating less. Don't eat snacks out of a box or package - pour yourself the intended amount and put the container away.

Positive expectations (name - "home-made;" and environment - china plate) help create food satisfaction.

Ice requires body heat (expenditure of calories) to melt.

Behavior modification experts say it takes about one month to break an old habit. Three 100-calorie changes/day can result in up to 30 lbs. less in a year.