Mindless Eating BOOK REVIEW ! Are You On A "Diet?"-- Here Are Some Hidden Psychological Influences On Eating Patterns + Habits

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The things I learned

while reading this book were very intriguing, also mind provoking due to some conflicting knowledge I have previously attained. To start off, one of the first things that was put into perspective for me was that most people eat when we “think” that we are hungry. However, in reality there are several cues that make us eat “mindlessly” without even realizing that we are. The author performed several experiments to test his theories on what may cause people to eat more than they do, and almost every participant involved in these studies were not aware of the influences that these cues had over them. This is what makes mindlessly eating so dangerous, because most people are not aware that it is taking place and if they do notice these cues having influence over someone else they think that they are immune to such influences and they are too smart for something so small to dictate how much they eat. As his studies have shown, the cues that lead us to overeating does not have much to do with intelligence because these are innate psychological responses that we really can’t control unless we are fully conscious of them at the point and time that we are eating.

Another thing I have learned; Any sign with a number promotion leads us to buy thirty to one hundred percent more than what we normally would. I am especially guilty and susceptible to this tactic. Almost always when going into a grocery store or supermarket, I have my eye out for deals or the 2 for 3 dollar snacks. Subconsciously aware that I’m spending more money on something I normally wouldn’t buy, I buy it anyway because in my mind I’m getting a deal.

Deprivation Diets

are not effective when it comes to food, why? As the author states, it goes against our body because we are naturally supposed to eat consistent variety of foods every three to four hours throughout the day. Our environment fights against deprivation diets because everywhere we turn there are cues telling us to eat, eat, eat! It goes against the way our minds work because when we are consistently telling ourselves not to eat something it makes us want it even more in an environment telling us to eat and a body that’s used to eating one way, then all of a sudden having to make this drastic change that our body nor our minds are used to. We are made to eat as much as we can as frequently as we so within this dilemma, it causes failure among most people that make an attempt at these diets. Studies have shown that most people that go on deprivation diets gain all of the weight they’d lost right back, because so much effort had been put into telling themselves what not to eat instead of focusing on what they should be eating. This is why it’s much easier to change your environment when it comes to your diet instead of your mind. Like the example the author gave in the book; Even when he was aware of how signs with promotion leads cause us to buy more than that we usually would, he still found himself pilling up on packs of gum that was on sale. Changing your mind requires a serious amount of discipline that not many people possess, so changing the environment is always an easier route.

There is a range between mindlessly loosing and gaining weight, and the author states that if you’re a little above or below this is how people seemingly out of nowhere are no longer able to fit the same pants they’ve been wearing for years. He also stated that if every day you add only 100 calories to your diet and take away 100 calories o your diet you can mindlessly loose or gain weight because it’s still in between the margin of not being able to tell whether you’ve eaten too much or too little. I was somewhat conflicted with this finding because someone can drink a 300 calorie soda and 1000 calories worth of cookies for that one day and still gain weight even if you’re under the 2000 calorie line. He gave an example of how a college of his cut six cans of coke she would drink a week, 139 calories each out of her life. Due to this she lost about 20 pounds, but I don’t agree that it was due to caloric intake and more so because of the nutritional content of the food itself. If she cut 6 servings of 139 calories worth of almonds every week out of her life the results would have been different. Maybe would have even gained weight because of the boost a food like almonds can give to your metabolism. A theory that I do lean more towards that the author mentions is giving yourself less without depriving yourself. Eating twenty percent less of bad food and adding twenty percent more of good foods like fruits and veggies can help on a journey of mindlessly losing weight.

Our stomachs count not what we eat,

unless we can see what it is and how much of it that we’re eating. Once food goes into our stomachs that’s pretty much it, and we have no recollection of how much we ate unless we have an empty potato chip bag or chicken wings left to let us know how much we’ve actually eaten. Inmates with an average sentence of about six months gain 20-25 pounds. This happens most of the time because we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten or how much we’ve gained without some type of external benchmark and because inmates wear the same clothes and the same color for a long period of time they can’t see the difference in their weight gain until they go home and try to put on their old clothes.

If food looks big, we’ll feel full because we eat the volume that we want to eat. If we tell ourselves, “I’m going to eat off of this plate until I’m full”, that’s what we will most likely do but instead if we give ourselves a mission to complete such as “I’m going to clean my plate”, that’s what we will do. We eat the volume we tell our minds we want to eat. It takes up to 20 minutes for our body and brain to signal satiation so that we realize we are full, that’s enough time to eat a whole box of pizza if you’ve set your mind to it which reinforces the thought that we eat with our eyes instead of our stomach. If the soup bowl is continuously being filled with soup without us knowing and we’ve set out minds to finishing the bowl, who knows how much soup will be inside of that person by the time they’ve gotten full.

The larger the serving of food you give to people, the less accurate their calorie estimation will be, but people underestimating caloric amounts of big meals may be correlational but I don’t think it is so much causational because there may be other psychological factors involved that can cause a person to underestimate how much they are eating. If you have more food, space to store your food and bigger packages of your food you are more likely to eat more food, because psychologically your consumption norm goes up. So if you only eat a quarter of the large package you feel like you haven’t eaten enough or that you could come back for more without over doing it because of the size.

Overall,

this book has had an effect on the way I think when it comes to how I consume the foods that I eat, and the little yet insignificant things that can influence whether I want to eat or not. Like how the North Dakota and California wine experiment exposed how something as simple as a label can determine whether we like the taste of something or not. Sometimes this can be a good thing and lead you away from dangerous foods. Sometimes it can make you an idiot letting labels fool you. I know that the knowledge I’ve gotten from this book will be useful to me and that I can be more conscious and aware of the way my mind works in order to make better decisions so that I don’t find myself mindlessly eating.

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