Mindless Eating, Part I

by Joanna

I’m reading an excellent book at the moment.  My friends over at the County Health Department recommended it.  It’s called Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink.  The author has a PhD in Consumer Behavior and he conducts experiments that look at our dietary habits.

It’s a good book and actually pretty funny, too!  I’ll highlight some of the information that I read and as I get through the book, I’ll let you know what I find out.

First they talk about the Mindless Margin - the amount of food that we slightly over or slightly under eat without being aware of it.  Every day, we make about 200 food related decisions.  Are we going to have a bagel or cereal for breakfast; toasted bagel or untoasted; plain cream cheese or strawberry cream cheese on that bagel, etc…. 

For most of us, the mindless margin is somewhere between 50 and 300 calories that we can either eat or not eat without us feeling deprived or stuffed.  And when you do the math, it adds up quickly!

So let’s do the math.  If 3,500 calories is equal to a pound, then eating 300 extra “mindless” calories a day would mean adding on about 30 pounds over the course of a year! 

On the flip side, eating 300 calories LESS a day would mean losing about 30 pounds over a year (keep in mind this would be with the same amount of physical activity that you are currently participating in). 

To put it into a little more of a perspective, 10 extra calories a day would be about a pound gained over a year.  10 measly calories a day – which, as Brian Wansink points out in his book, is ONE stick if Juicy Fruit gum.  Scary.  Check out CalorieKing.com to search their large database of foods and their nutritional values.

The good news is that if we are more mindful of what we are consuming, we can put the power of weight loss in our hands.  Just remember that the weight probably didn’t come on in two weeks, so don’t expect it all to come off in two weeks.  It takes time, my friend.  Be steadfast.

The other good thing is that if we increase our activity, we can burn off the mindless food we eat.  Take a look at WebMD’s interactive tool that measures how many calories are burned with different types of activity.  100 extra calories burned a day (about a mile of walking for most of us) works out to be about 10 pounds lost over the course of a year.

So take a minute to think about what you are eating before you consume it.  I’ll write more about what I read in the book as I go!

 

 


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