6 Odd Ways to Control Your Food by Joan Kent, PhD

Here’s an unusual approach! This article covers 6 relatively unknown tips that can help us control how much we eat.

 

Odd Tip #1:  Hide Your Breakfast Cereal

This tip comes from Dr. Brian Wansink, known for his work on food psychology and eating behaviors. His research has shown that keeping breakfast cereal in full view throughout the day – say, on the kitchen counter – has an upward impact on weight.

 

It didn’t matter if the cereal was junky (Cocoa Puffs) or healthful (oatmeal). Just keeping it visible was the salient factor.

 

And the difference in weight between revealers and concealers was considerable.

 

Since it doesn’t affect meals directly, keeping cereal in the kitchen cabinet seems like an easy way to help control food intake.

 

Odd Tip #2:  Change Your Plate Color

I’ve come across this tip in two ways.

 

1) Using a plate that’s the same color as the food you’re eating encourages eating more food.

 

Meals, of course, include foods of different colors. A practical way to use this might be to think in terms of side dishes you’d like to limit. For example, if the side dish is white – potatoes, pasta, white rice – you might avoid using a white plate.

 

2) Also, eating from a blue plate seems to make us eat less. One theory is that the color blue is “off-putting.”  Could this match up with the first part because there’s no blue food? (Yeah, yeah, blueberries are purple.)

 

So if we want to eat lots of vegetables, should we use green plates??

 

Odd Tip #3:  Limit Variety

 

Variety seems to make us eat more. It could be one reason that a buffet-style meal encourages overeating.

 

I’ve also heard that keeping many types of food in the kitchen may have a similar effect, prompting us to sample all the different foods.

 

Maybe the best way to enjoy variety is to change shopping lists from week to week, rather than buying many different foods at one time.

 

Odd Tip #4:  Shrink Your Serving Spoons

One study used M&Ms to see how people ate from a big, full bowl of them in an office setting. A large scoop invited greater M&M consumption than a teaspoon.

 

I wonder if there’s an unconscious link between the number of “spooning” actions and how much food we’re willing to take. One scooping action may seem less greedy than 5 teaspoons, even if the quantity is the same.

 

A way to put this to use at home might be to use smaller serving spoons for the foods you’d like to limit (for example, mac & cheese) and larger ones for vegetables and other healthful fare.

 

Odd Tip #5:  Change Your Eating Rate

Eating slowly is a meal tip that’s been around a long time. It’s said to decrease food volume – but it didn’t work for women, although it did for men.

 

What worked for both men and women was to begin the meal at a normal eating rate, then slow down to about half speed for the rest of the meal.

 

The article I read didn’t specify exactly when to slow down, so I’d suggest just after the initial hunger has passed.

 

Odd Tip #6:  Eat Small Food

Cutting food into very small pieces seems to limit the amount we eat.

 

Again, is this about the plate-to-mouth action? If it takes more of those motions to eat the food, maybe we unconsciously limit the arm actions, rather than the amount of food per se.

 

Whatever the reasons behind these odd tips, they don’t involve eating different foods or counting calories, just a few easy shifts in behaviors.

 

I’m for whatever works – and if they help us control our intake, why not give them a try?

 

If you’d like help with food intake or any aspect of your nutrition, I’m dedicated to helping you. Just visit LastResortNutrition and grab your free Power Eating Consult. Discover how easy it is for a few small tweaks to lead to great results!

 

Brought to you by Dr. Joan Kent, best-selling author of Stronger Than Sugar.