Mindless Eating

Brian Wansink is a psychology PhD who has spent his career studying why we eat what we eat (and why we eat the amount that we do).

 

The idea in this book is that most overeating is mindless. It’s not cause by physical hunger, but by external cues and triggers.

 

He cites the the various studies that his team has done and shares tips about how to cut the “mindless margin,” this extra food that people don’t need or notice eating that leads to long-term weight gain.

 

The book was endlessly interesting to me for a couple of reasons, first of all I’m fascinated by the psychology of behavior, especially the effect that marketing has on it and this book has a lot of interesting information.

 

The other thing that made it so interesting was that it was a reminder that I could learn a lot from a book where I disagree with one of the fundamental premises. Let’s take a second to talk about exactly where I disagree:

 

Why do we get fat?

 

If you’re familiar with my story, you’ll know that in my 20’s I was slowly gaining weight for basically the whole decade. This mystified me as I was decently active, and I ate what I thought was a healthy diet. I ate whole grain pasta, lots of chicken, and I had swapped my junk food snacks out for fruit and “veggie straws” (which surprisingly aren’t that bad).

 

Yet I was still gaining weight. Maybe my metabolism had slowed down, I was so scrawny my whole childhood. Maybe This was just going to be the way it was for a while. Slowly gaining weight, a couple of pounds a year, year after year, for the rest of my life.

 

Finally, shortly after I turned 30, I decided to go on a real diet, not just “watch what I was eating.” I read The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss and decided I was going to try to give the slow-carb diet a try.

 

The results have been spectacular. I’ve been able to stick with the diet, lose weight, and not feel deprived.

 

For a while, I thought the real reason the slow-carb diet worked was because it was easy to stick to. You never had to go hungry since there is absolutely no calorie restriction. You were never deprived of your favorite foods, since there is a weekly unrestricted cheat day.

 

This has led me to start preaching that “Psychology is more important than Biology” when it comes to dieting and losing weight. The core premise is the fact that everyone agrees in general what makes us fat. No one thinks that more donuts and less vegetables is a good way to lose weight or eat healthy. Sure some diets are better biologically speaking, but and 80% effective diet that you can stick to indefinitely is infinitely better than a 100% perfect diet that you can’t make it past a month with.

 

So to a large degree, I believe that the psychological aspect of dieting is more important than the biological component.

 

But that doesn’t mean that biology is unimportant. When deciding what lifestyle choices you want to make, it’s incredibly important to know what foods are healthy, which are unhealthy, and which make you fat.

 

That brings me to the major premise of Mindless Eating that I disagreement, the notion that people get fat because they overeat.

 

Formally, that position is called “the energy balance hypothesis.” You’ll usually hear it identified with phrases like “calories in, calories out,” and “a calorie is a calorie, is a calorie is a calorie…”

 

I call it the Catholic theory of obesity, both because it basically says that gluttony and sloth are the causes of obesity, and because it’s a religious dogma that must be adhered to by faith (and in the case of the energy balance hypothesis, a misunderstanding of how to apply the first law of thermodynamics to biology).

 

There’s a far more compelling alternative hypothesis, which is usually just called the alternative hypothesis despite that fact that it was around first and the evidence for it is far more compelling.

 

The gist of it is that the reason we get fat is because of the astronomically high sugar content of our modern diet. Some people do better than others in handling the sugar content of our modern diet, mostly do to good genes. But wherever people are gaining weight or getting diabetes, the sugar is to blame just like cigarettes are to blame for lung cancer despite the fact that not every heaver smoker gets lung cancer.

 

For a really good overview of the alternative hypothesis, I strongly recommend the book Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes.

 

Anyway, I’m entirely sold on the alternative hypothesis. Everyone should do as much as they can to limit the amount of sugar and refined carbohydrates (like white flour) that they consume.

 

The good news is that even though people who adhere to the religious dogma of the energy balance hypothesis usually recommend people cut down on sugar. Their reasoning is the fact that they view sugar as empty calories since it provides no essential vitamins or minerals, and obviously if you’re cutting calories, you want to focus on the “empty” ones.

 

This is why calorie-restricted diets can work. They cut the sugar content of the diet. Any time you see a “high-carb” diet that restricts calories, it’s really a low-sugar, low-carb diet because you end up eating far less sugar and far fewer carbs than the diet that caused you to gain weight (they call it a “high-carb” diet because carbs make up a higher percentage of your caloric intake than protein or fat, but the honest truth is that these diets are indirectly restricting carbohydrates).

 

This is why I saw that the psychology is more important than the biology, even those who get the biology wrong end up recommending that you cut out most of the correct foods. So the biggest factor that will determine your success is finding a diet that you can stick to long term. One where you don’t feel “deprived.”

 

The diet I like is the slow-carb diet, which I have written about in the past.

 

So how does this advice help someone with my diet?

 

Th primary answer is limiting the cheat day damage. I think it’s important to cheat hard on cheat day. It’s meant to relieve the psychological burden of dieting. You shouldn’t be coming up with rules to limit cheat day such as limiting yourself to just one caloric beverage or not ordering the supersized fast food meal. But if you want to limit the damage of cheat day without feeling deprived, this book has some awesome ideas for you.

 

If you go for a standard calorie-restricted diet, I would consider this book and absolute must read. It’s hard to stick to a calorie restricted diet and without this book or one very similar, you’re probably in trouble.

 

If you’re on a diet like mine, this book is valuable for the psychological insight you gain, as well as some tips for limiting the cheat day damage.

 

Here are some of the notes that I took from this book:

 

• The average person makes over 200 choices about food a day (breakfast or no breakfast, bagel or toast, kitchen or car, etc).
• “The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.”
• “We overeat because there are signals and cues that tell us to keep eating. If there are still two soggy fruit loops at the bottom of the bowl, there is still work to be done.”
• “It’s easier to change our environment than our mind.”
• There are three things working against a deprivation diet: our body, our mind, our environment
• Being deprived is not a great way to enjoy life
• “Cutting out our favorite foods is a bad idea, cutting down how much of them we mindlessly eat is doable.” My comment: this is why a cheat day is important. You can still have your favorite foods, but for six out of seven days you can keep your insulin levels low, allowing weight loss to happen.
• We usually determine how much we should eat, and we usually mindlessly base it on what we ate the day before.
• If the food looks bigger, you will feel more full, even if it has the same amount of calories as a smaller-looking option.
• Most of us decide how much we want to eat before we put any food in our mouths.
• Our brains have a tendency to emphasize height at the expense of width (no one ever comments on the width of the St. Louis arch despite the fact that it is just as wide as it is tall) as a result, people pour less into tall skinny glasses than they do short fat ones (even professional bartenders)
• “Big dishes and big spoons are big trouble.” Mainly because they make food look small, causing us to over-serve the food while underestimating the calories we eat.
• Whenever there is more variety in terms of food, you will eat more. For example, if there is only vanilla ice cream available you’ll quickly grow bored and decide you’ve had enough. When there are multiple varieties, you’ll want to try “a little of each” and it will take longer for you to decide you are finished. This is known as sensory-specific satiety.
• The bigger the package you poor from, the more you will eat (wholesale food club shoppers beware!). To combat this, divide your big package into smaller ones and put the excess ones out of sight.
• Beware of the “bad mood, bad food” bias: you are more likely to east chips and junk food when you are in a bad mood.
• Beware of the halo effect: When Subway was marketing how healthy their sandwiches were, people believed them. So people would go to Subway thinking they were “eating healthy” and would then get a 22 ounce soda (probably with a refill) and a cookie. Subway’s messaging had a halo effect on the food they served. Brian’s best quote on the halo effect: “the better (i.e. healthier) the food, the worse the extras.”
• He recommends making three small changes to your diet that you can sustain in the long term. He says to have some sort of accountability, like a habit tracker where you record if you adhered to your rules that day (the rules you make can be something like “I can have a beer in the evening if I don’t visit the vending machine at work,” etc.)
• Beware the tyranny of the moment: Brian recommends forming habits and having accountability, because otherwise you will constantly cheat by telling yourself “this moment is special”

 

If you liked the classic book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I think you’ll love this book. So many of the studies that he mentions are so interesting.

 

I’m really glad that I read this book and think that I learned a lot, but I will only recommend it with the caveat that I don’t think that the energy balance hypothesis is true, and would recommend you read Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes if you want a book that actually gives you the biological blueprint.