Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

Will you lose a ton of weight if you read this book? Probably not. However, it does provide some great insight and great tips for getting rid of those pesky 100-200 calories a day that end up costing us at least 10 pounds a year. It's helped me focus in on a few problem areas that I had, and assisted me in losing about 25 pounds this year. I eat off smaller plates. I avoid buying big boxes of things that might tempt me to over-eat. I understand portions better. If nothing else, the book is a quick read with helpful insights and a light-hearted and funny approach.

At the beginning, I wasn't very surprised with the ideas in this book. Everyone knows a smaller plate means you eat less. But it is so much more than that. It had the feel of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point with innumerable studies to explain our relationship with food. After reading Mindless Eating I understand why Doritos just introduced "two-flavor" bags of chips. My high school children really enjoyed listening to the studies and we've been applying them in the kitchen. It turned out to be the best non-diet (but lose weight) book I've read.

Last November, 16 months after my son was born I was still carrying an extra 45 pounds. I bought this book just after Thanksgiving, read it, and took the author's advice to just try three of his suggestions. Five months later I have lost 35 pounds. And I am still losing. The author's point is that we don't monitor every calorie. We can't. Instead we work with cues to decide what to eat, and when to stop. Understand the cues, and you can change them to lower your daily calories. I enjoyed the tales of diet research, but I think what worked for me was the practical suggestions -- instead of trying to rein in my "emotional eating," I just bought smaller plates and started covering half of the plate with veggies. Sounds dumb, but now I serve dinner off of the salad plates, and I eat less without thinking about it. I especially like the insight that cutting 10 calories a day for a year equals one pound. I used to think of 50 calories here and 100 calories there as not really important, but now I realize they were adding up. I apply this insight to seconds and desserts and snacks. I pick up a 50 calorie cookie and I ask myself -- is this cookie, right now, worth 5 lbs in weight? Occasionally the answer is yes -- and I enjoy my cookie. But more often I realize I'm not really hungry, I'm just eating the cookie because it is there. I think I was unusually ready to lose some serious weight. And my weight loss has definitely slowed in the last month. I've only lost about three pounds, instead of the 5-7 I had been averaging. But overall I have never had such good, quick results from a weight loss regimen. I can't recommend "Mindless Eating" highly enough. P.S. I would think that the opposite of the advice in the book would also work if you were trying to gain weight -- buy big plates, eat many small snacks, and so forth. Update: I wrote this original post in May of 2007. It is now August of 2007. I have lost another 10 pound, which means I have now lost the full 45 pounds of "baby fat" I gained during my pregnancy. I have gone from an "obese" BMI to the high end of "normal" BMI. Now it will be interesting to see if I keep losing weight (I would like to lose another ten pounds.) But even if I never lose another ounce, I am happy, proud, and grateful to Brian Wansink for writing "Mindless Eating."

What really caught my attention was the fact the author shows over and over how 'we' so often eat, even if the stuff we are eating is stale popcorn or food that on second thought we wouldn't even feed to a stray starving dog. That food for 'us' is often more emotional than nutritional or helpful. After reading the book I find myself stopping before I reach for something to eat, asking myself if I am actually hungry and if so, if what I am about to eat is worth my time. I even find that I am planning meals better, so I get as much bang from them as possible. I also found the authors research on what men and women see as comfort foods, interesting. Guess I am more male minded since I also like soup. This is a book one will probably pick up and re read and glean new information from. Not preachy at all, but full of wise information and fun to boot.

Dr. Wansink is a food psychologist who specializes in the investigation of the mental and emotional factors that cause us to eat. This book demonstrates that we can lose weight, simply by being more mindful of our eating habits. It contains interesting and humorous case studies that highlight those mindless activities that add 200 or 300 calories to our diet each day and which can add up to 20 or 30 excess pounds in the course of a year. The author provides practical suggestions at the end of each chapter that will help you to make the simple changes that will allow you to lose 2 or 3 pounds per month without resorting to conventional diet techniques that are doomed to failure. Although this book is based upon scientific research and extensively end-noted, it is enjoyable to read, easy to understand and quite funny at times. This book is a great value for the money and the five or six hours that it will take to read it.