Mindless Eating summary

As you’ve seen, when it comes to food, your choices can be influenced on a subconscious level through things like descriptive adjectives: a “succulent” dish, for instance, tastes better than a regular one.

While marketers can take advantage of this fact to affect our food choices, luckily, we can also harness some of our own subconscious thinking patterns to eat less.

As we’ve already seen, our subconscious plays a big part in how much we eat. Perhaps the most obvious and most easily adjustable factor affecting our food consumption is our food’s presentation.

Quite simply, the bigger the plate or container of food given to us, the more we’ll eat.

The human body has a wonderfully broad and intricate set of ways to convey what state it’s in. For example, if we’ve eaten something dangerous we get nauseous, and if we’ve been injured, we feel pain.

Unfortunately, when it comes to eating, the bodily cues that signal fullness are not sufficient to stop us from consuming more food.

Be honest: when was the last time you looked at the recommended serving size on your 20 oz bottle of Coke? Probably never. Because one small bottle equals one serving, right?

Wrong.

Many parents today regulate how much and what kind of television their kids watch. By doing so, they’re encouraging their children to socialize and protecting them from inappropriate content.

But there’s another important aspect affecting the health of a household’s members: the food available to them. These foods should also be closely regulated.

Have you ever tried to go on a diet only to find yourself relapsing into your old habits just a few weeks later?

If so, don’t feel bad. It’s less of a personal failure than you think. The fact is that diets demand radical changes to your routines, and radical changes are hard to adhere to.

Think back for a moment: When was the last time you counted how many breadsticks you ate at your favorite Italian restaurant? Probably never.

We don’t normally keep track of how much we eat. In fact, we often have no idea how much we’ve actually eaten after a meal; we just basically assume that, however much we ate, it was probably pretty much the right amount.

The key message in this book:

Although it might seem counterintuitive, we have very little control over our eating habits: covert tricks used by marketers and restaurants as well as subtle social and visual cues all influence how, and how much, we eat. However, by being mindful of our eating habits and making conscious decisions about how we eat, we can make modest, incremental changes to our diets.