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Mindful eating and keeping weight off

Submitted by Merlin on January 3, 2008 - 6:33am.

Reason Magazine - Secrets of Weight Loss Revealed!

This review of two recent diet books underscores what most of us already know all too well: while it’s easy enough to drop a few pounds for a short while, it’s nearly impossible to lose a lot of weight for a long time.

What caught my attention for anyone wishing to apply some fancy book-learning directly to the affected area was this chunk of insight on eating mindfully – alongside a smart bit of life-hacky weight loss advice:

Wansink’s overarching point is that, when it comes to food, we’re not paying attention. “It takes up to 20 minutes for our body and brain to signal satiation,” he notes, and Americans often finish their meals in less time than that. Instead of internal signals we rely on external cues to tell us when we’re done: Is the plate clean? Is everyone else done? Is there more in the serving dish?

To counteract such cues, Wansink recommends such tactics as using smaller plates (which make portions seem larger), keeping serving dishes in the kitchen (which discourages second helpings), replacing short, wide glasses with tall, thin ones (which make drinks seem bigger), keeping food scraps and bones on your plate (which reminds you how much you’ve eaten), and dividing snacks from big packages into smaller bags or plastic containers (which discourages you from devouring the entire package).

I’m also a big-fan of guesstimating portion with real-world objects. Although, candidly, the last time I ate beef, it was less like a deck of cards and more like the whole blackjack shoe.

[via: Arts & Letters Daily]

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Mind me.

Submitted by grant on January 3, 2008 - 8:50am.

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:

Quote:
She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general's definition of an active lifestyle.

The other group was given no information at all.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

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.