Here’s a little mindful eating trick I use whenever I can.

After a bite, put the fork down and pay attention to the food in your mouth. Don’t touch the fork until your mouth is empty and has returned to neutral, with only the memory of food remaining. You’re more likely to notice when you’re full and can enjoy less food for a longer time.

nods - I think I’ll try that. Instead of a 12” dinner plate I’ll try using 5” diameter Chinese rice bowls. If it’s too big for that, it’s too big, no seconds allowed.

Referring to Wansink’s book as a diet book is a bit misleading, and somewhat demeaning, IMHO. It’s an amazing little book full of great stories that help send home the messages in the book.

My doc recommended it to me about a year ago, and I picked it up but didn’t actually start reading it until about four months ago. The simple changes I’ve put into effect have led to fifteen pounds of sustainable weight loss.

Seriously, having that knowledge made navigating the minefield of the holidays easy. I ate to satisfaction, enjoyed the food, and didn’t put on a single pound - if anything, I lost about a pound.

It’s a light read, but I tend to only read it while eating, funny enough, so I haven’t quite finished it, but it’s a great book that I’m enjoying eating and reading my way through. I highly recommend it.

The portion sizings I learned, which really helped (no, forced) me to understand how overwhelmingly oversized most American restaurant meals are, differ slightly than the ones linked above, but I think are easier to remember because there are fewer and built on the concept of food groups: starch/grain, fruit/veg, and protein.

• 1 serving protein: palm of your hand
• 1 serving starch: what fits in your cupped hand (leveled off, not mounded!)
• 1 serving fruit or veg: size of your fist

Another trick that has been working wonders recently is that everybody in our family stops eating when the first person (always our daughter) finishes. I’ve never been left hungry, and as a bonus we never have a daughter clamoring to get out of her high-chair while the adults finish gorging themselves! In addition, having to feed a child really helps you slow your own eating, which (as mentioned above) gives you time to register how full you are.

The bottom line? Everybody go out and have kids! It does wonders for your waistline!

Watched a BBC documentary last year and later my wife bought the book based on it: The Truth About Food. Great read that dispels many of the myths about food, eating, dieting etc. Many of the tips listed above are mentioned along with the scientific experiments (some goofy) that prove the point. They really do seem to work.

1. Okinawan mindfulness: hara hachi bu! (Eighty percent full!)
I've read that it's traditional to actually say those three words before starting to eat. Actually saying something out loud is a good way to, like, keep it in your mind. Even if it's in Japanese.

2. Did you catch the NPR story on the placebo effect this morning? It focused on an exercise study and the power of suggestion. The key grafs:

In other words, somehow knowing that they were doing something made that thing happen, whether or not the actual doing was taking place.

So on some level, making yourself know you're doing something is the real goal to these exercises.

I’d like to at least mention The Hacker’s Diet, by John Walker, which worked rather well for me. The thing it stresses is that losing weight is, from a certain point of view, just eating fewer calories than you use, to your metabolism’s limit. The real key to it is the constant monitoring it forces on you — track how much you eat every day, and track how much you weigh. Over time, you see the correlation — eating less leads to you weighing less.

It feels like actual science!

You can get the PDF for free, and there are some Excel spreadsheets for tracking your weight and how much you eat, which I wound up porting to Numbers. It might cater better to the OCD crowd, and you do have to sit around miserable and hungry, but it works pretty well.

As important as how much you eat is what you eat. Many people turn to salads and other “healthy” foods. But the dressings they use are mostly water and high fructose corn syrup (HFC). HFC does weird things in a person’s body. Horrible things and contributes greatly to obesity in America. I made some easy dressing recipes for Winepairings, my food blog, last year, which are great and don’t contain anything weird.

Also, cut the soda. Even diet sodas, studies now suggest, can contribute to overeating.

Just chew your food (20-50 times is good). Another idea is, just eat. Don’t watch TV and eat, don’t read and eat, etc.

Resident of Japan here, and that’s a saying in Japan.

Just as grant said above, ‘Hara-hachi-bu’ is a Japanese traditional saying to keep yourself 80% full. Many elders here who lives beyond one hundred years says that the habit of eating 80%-full is the secret to longevity.

So I always go out to buy my rice bowl accoding to my personal 80%, not the one that looks good.