mindless eating

Table of Content

📃 Book Details

Name – Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
Author – Brian Wansink
Originally published – 17 October 2006
Publisher – Bantam; Reprint edition (28 December 2010)
Language – English
Pages – 304 pages.

🚀 Book wrap-up

Mindless eating is a book by Brian Wansink, a food psychologist who tried to answer food questions that have always puzzled us and made our faces grim. This book explores how our strings are being pulled around without us ever knowing when it comes to food.

Brian Wansink seasoned the book with instinctive questions like What makes us love certain food? Why do we always eat more than we should? Why is our diet failing? Most importantly, how we can consciously eat without having to bite our nails eyeing the calorie chart?

This deliciously cooked book answers these questions with factual data and practical solutions while also bring out the flavors of a delightful read.

🎨 Should you read Mindless Eating?

Struggling with following diets?

Being puzzled by how your dresses are mysteriously tightening up?

Does food also fill your heart and soul and not just your tiny tummy?

Have a curious wanderlust mind that gets excited by human psychology?

Did you say yes? then go read it.

The book is written for people who can’t put down their plate as quickly as they picked it up and whose diet feels like a terrible marriage that you curse every single day.

If you are that person. Why not read a book that was written for you?

Consider reading this book if you want to be in control of what you eat.

📒 My Book Notes of Mindless Eating.

The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.

Reengineering Strategy #1: Think 20 Percent—More or Less

The size of your plate decides how much you eat. You will eat more on a bigger plate and less on a smaller one. So it is time to switch to smaller plates!

The meal that you have enjoyed will be the one you thought you will enjoy and loathed the ones you thought you will, even if it is the same food.

Does your diet plan deprive you of your comfort food? Then it is not a smart diet plan.

If you are trying to put on or cut down some weight, your body won’t let that happen if it knows you are doing it. But thankfully, there is a calorie range called Mindless margin, which your body can’t detect. It is 20% of what you eat. Your body won’t realize if you have eaten 20% more or less. So for putting on weight, you need to eat 20% more, and to cut down weight; you need to eat 20% less.

Reengineering Strategy #2: See All You Eat

The reason we overeat is that we can’t see how much we have eaten. Our body and mind are terrible at estimating it. So next time you eat, see how much you are going to eat first than wondering about it after finishing your plate

Reengineering Strategy #3: Be Your Own Tables caper

You will finish your whole food packet. Whether it is big or smaller simply doesn’t matter.

Keep your food in smaller packing and bowls and avoid buying large food packets.

Reengineering Strategy #4: Make Overeating a Hassle, Not a Habit

The best way to avoid cheating on your diet is not to amass willpower, it is to keep those foods out of sight.

Use your environment to your advantage and make it difficult to cheat on your diet and easier to follow your diet.

Reengineering Strategy #5: Create Distraction-Free Eating Scripts

If you are eating in a group, don’t finish early as you will then have to keep eating until everyone is finished. Slow your pace and don’t let your conversation distract you from how much you are eating.

Distractions can work for you and against you while eating. Distractions like TV can make you lose track of how much you have eaten and cause overeating. You can also use the TV to distract yourself from eating.

Avoid distractions while snacking.

Reengineering Strategy #6: Create Expectations That Make You a Better Cook

How a food taste depends on how it looks, what you think it will taste rather than how it tastes.

Use your atmosphere to make the meal enjoyable with lights and soft music because your flavor depends on it.

Having descriptive names instead of simple names will influence you to think that the food is special, which makes it taste special for you. So have attractive names can make your food taste good as well.

Reengineering Strategy #7: Make Comfort Foods More Comforting

We all have some comfort food that we fall back on to comfort ourselves. We have comfort food from past associations created, reminiscent of some special memory, and a symbol of personality identification. Whatever your reason is, it has some unbreakable emotional value to it.

Don’t follow a diet that deprives you of your comfort food because that diet will inevitably fail.

You can also rewire yourself to find new, healthier comfort food if all your comfort foods are unhealthy.

Reengineering Strategy #8: Crown Yourself as the Official Gatekeeper

Never use food as punishment or reward. Understand the benefits of healthy food and allure yourself into eating healthy foods. Also, understand the consequences of unhealthy ones and repel yourself from them.

The more you are exposed to different flavors as a child, the more nutritionally well-rounded you will be.

Follow a half plate rule. Half plate rules say half of your plate should be vegetables and fruits, the other half should be proteins and starch.

Reengineering Strategy #9: Portion-Size Me

We overestimate the benefits of low carb, low fat, and sugar-free products thinking that they don’t have carbohydrate, fat, or sugar but these are food that has it just slightly lower. We will lose the benefits of low carb food the moment you overeat saying it is low carb.

🔭 Review of Mindless Eating

When you have your hopes high in the skies, anything short of spectacular isn’t satisfying. That is what I struggled with while reading this book. A recommendation by Ramit Sethi, someone I deeply admire. His blurb was that this book is about human psychology and understanding why we do what we do. Which honestly felt inaccurate when I read it. This book is all about food. Psychology is a mere tool to understand our relationship with food and not the other way around.

The books don’t aim to treat you with fascinating psychological findings that you can brag about with your friends. Yet, you can feast on these simple psychological reasons that unearth some revelation about eating observations.

You will find your eyes bulging out and your heart instantly connecting with this book if you are or trying to be a tad (or even maniacally) health conscious. The book is stuffed with all the problems you might have come across and caused you insomnia. The best part is that the solutions are simple and very effective.

This is not a handbook for orchestrating a perfect diet plan or to help you reach that zero size you have been fancying all along. The book is just to make you informed about the most basic of things that could affect your food consumption and help you work your way out.

Final Verdict

I, for one, don’t fall into this book’s demographic of the reader except for being a teeny tiny psychology nerd. Despite that, what made me finish this book is simplicity that you can savor, like a piece of cake. This book did not enchant me by its content, so I can only imagine how profound this book might be for people who can identify and connect with what this book is all about. For me, this book remains an easy, witty, but much-needed foundation for my dinner table.

Let me say it out loud so you won’t be drowning in disappointment like I did when you realize what this book is about. This book is not your one-way ticket to a fat-free paradise but only offers a much-needed push to toss you in that direction. Also, this book is not filled with psychological findings that can take your breath away but are about that can take some food away.

💯 My Rating

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🛒 Where to find Mindless Eating?

Here is the amazon link if you are interested in buying one.

Click here to go to the Amazon page.

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