Be (mindlessly) healthier

So, reading your blogs, I’m noticing a consistent trend. Lots of you are thinking about weight. It makes sense — you’re here, you’re reading this, so you must be interested in eating better. But still, it always strikes me just how many of us are not only thinking about it, but feeling bad about it. Some of us stand in front of mirrors and look at our thighs. Some of us feel guilty about not getting to the gym enough. Some of us do regular weigh-ins. Some of us simply feel bad.

And it’s not just us bloggers; a good friend who lost weight told me recently that she’s now at a place where she thinks of food as the enemy. And that broke my heart a little, because I believe with an almost religious ferocity that food, the right food, can make our lives so much richer.

But it’s true, we live in a world where most of the food is the wrong food. In this world, 15,000 new food products are introduced every year, nearly all of them unhealthful. In this world, when you go to the grocery store, you pass literally miles of rows of soft drinks, empty snacks, candy, and highly processed, low-nutrition packaged foods. In this world, marketers with billion-dollar budgets hire the smartest minds in the world to figure out how to convince you to reach out and grab foods that you hadn’t planned to buy. In this world, the best food values are the ones that make us unhealthy. In this world, it is really, really hard to eat right.

Which is why I returned this week to a fantastic book I read in December, and which should be required reading for anyone who wants to eat even just a teeny weeny bit better: Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink. Wansink founded the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, where he puts real research into the hidden persuaders that convince us to buy, eat, and keep eating different kinds of foods. It’s Freakonomics for Food-Minded Folks; it’s a fun read, and it’s fascinating.

We all apparently make over 200 food decisions every day, most of them totally unconscious. Wansink sheds a little light on those decisions, which in itself makes for fun, pop-psych kind of reading (how much do people consume if they eat soup from a trick bowl that keeps refilling without the eater knowing? How many more multi-colored M&Ms do we eat, vs. M&Ms that are all one color? How much of what people taste depends on what we see or hear while eating?).

Best of all, Wansink lets us in on a secret: there is a “mindless margin” — the small but significant space between eating just a little less and just a little more, without noticing either way — that will either cause us to lose weight without thinking or to gain weight without thinking. And if we engineer our environment right, we can put ourselves on the lose-weight, or at least the don’t-gain-weight, side of the mindless margin. As he puts it, in a given day most people have no idea if they’ve consumed 100 calories less than normal or 100 calories more than normal…but the difference at a year’s end is 20 pounds.

It’s not a diet book, although he offers concrete ways you can ensure that the 200+ food decisions you make daily are more healthful ones. There’s plenty here for the dieter who can’t understand why, despite his best effort, the scale isn’t going down faster (or why it’s suddenly creeping back up again). There are also great insights for the home cook looking to make healthful foods “taste better” without added work, the restaurateur who wants to sell more food, or really anyone who wants to be more conscious about how, and why, he eats.

I am going to do a few posts with ideas from this book, but in the meantime, I highly recommend that you buy it. Yes, you could get it from the library, but this is one that you will probably want to return to occasionally, just as a refresher (it’s just as interesting the second time around for me).

In the meantime, you can read parts of the first chapter of the book, compliments of ABC News, here.

Go. Read. Be healthier…mindlessly.