Mindless eating... it's how we eat!

One of the books I relied on for good -- and fascinating -- information for How We Did It was Dr. Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think.

Dr. Wansink is called a "food psychologist." From his lab at Cornell University, he conducts experiments into the factors that lead us to eat what we eat. And you'd think that we eat what we eat because it tastes good, right? Wrong!

In some of his crazy experiments, Dr. Wansink has uncovered the many misguided reasons we eat. Among them are these:

• The size and shape of a bowl can almost double the amount of food you eat.
• Restaurants can get you to eat more by describing their menu items with adjectives.
• You will eat more candy if you throw away the wrappers as you go along than if you let the wrappers pile up.
• If you have bread served with dipping oil rather than with butter, you'll consume less bread but more calories.
  
• Grocery store signs that read 3-for-$3 rather than $1/each can more than double our purchases.

These are just a few of the fascinating facts Dr. Wansink has confirmed with his research. How can you apply this information to your food consumption? "By encouraging healthy, mindful eating, we can decrease obesity," Wansink says. "A keen awareness of all these hidden persuaders is an important step in controlling the amount and quality of food you eat."

For me, "mindful eating" means this:
I will not eat straight from a package. If I want some crackers, I'll put some on a plate.
I will not eat something just because it's there. Most chocolate made in the U.S. tastes like wax. I've stopped eating my son's leftover Halloween candy. If I want chocolate, I'll eat just a little bit of really good chocolate.
I absolutely do not shop when I'm hungry. The temptations are just too overwhelming. I'll have a small, healthy snack before I go, even if I'm in a hurry.
If I eat while watching TV, I choose the snack beforehand and set it out on the coffee table. No trips to the kitchen during a show!

How about you? What does "mindful eating" mean for you?

The Food Police: Failing!

At age 11, my son barely weighs 90 pounds. He's moderately active, plays baseball three seasons of the year, plays outside with friends. So, I figure I'm not doing so bad as the food and exercise police, right?!?

I decided to find out how I stack up as "the nutritional gatekeeper" that author Brian Wansick (Mindless Eating) identifies as the person in charge of family food choices. So I piled the kitchen table high with boxes, bags, bottles and packages. Here is a day's menu:

Breakfast: buttered toast or kids cereal, small handful of peanuts, ½ banana or apple, ½ cup of 1% milk
Lunch: 6 oz. low-fat yogurt or ½ cup sweetened applesauce, snack crackers, 1 pack fruit snacks, bottle of water
Snack: handful of red grapes, or celery stalk with 1 tbsp. peanut butter, toaster tart, ½ cup milk
Dinner: 6 homemade chicken nuggets with 1 tbsp. catsup, ½ cup mashed potatoes with butter, ¼ cup peas
Dessert or snack: 4 Oreos and ½ cup milk or ½ cup ice cream
During baseball season: one 20 oz. sports drink

I picked just one ingredient -- sugar -- to gauge how I was doing. On food labels, ingredients are listed by weight, in grams. Four grams of sugar equals one teaspoon. Counting only the added sugars—that is, not foods’ natural sugars—here’s the total:

Breakfast: 2 ¼ -5 ½ tsps.
Lunch: 8-8 ½ tsps.
Snack: 6 ½ tsp.
Dinner: 1 tsp.
Desserts or snack: 6 ½ tsps.
Sports drink: 8 ¾ tsps.

TOTAL: 23-37 teaspoons

Pretty bad, huh? And Dr. Wansink estimates that parents control only 72 percent of a child’s diet. Add in birthday cupcakes, pizza parties, lunch trades, team celebrations and other splurges, and his total could increase by almost 30 percent. At its worst, that’s about 48 teaspoons a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says to eat no more than 10 teaspoons of added sugar a day!

I took out a measuring cup. Those 48 teaspoons pile up to more than a cup of sugar. Going from bad to worse, I converted the sugar into calories, 16 calories per teaspoon. The total now? About 770 calories!

Estimate that a child under age 14 should consume 1,000 calories a day, plus 100 calories per year of age. That means my son's diet is about 2,100 calories a day. So, if his daily calorie count approximates this figure, he’s getting about 35 percent of his calories from sugar!

I'm not even talking about the fat and sodium in his diet, which I can see is considerable. It’s clear that we have some work to do before we're nominated for Best Nutritional Gatekeeper!

Obesity and family food choices

I've been to two high school productions recently. One was a musical, the other a choral event. Let me tell you what I noticed. In the musical, of the performers who didn't have lead roles, I'd say about 1 in 4 was overweight. In the choral production, the ratio was even higher -- nine of the 13 singers were overweight and probably five of them would be considered obese. I was shocked.

But maybe that's just the way it is today. Bill Baroni, a well-known New Jersey politician who told me about his 132-pound weight loss, said that when he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, he was the target of cruel comments and hurtful exclusion by other children because he was “the fat kid” in his class. But today, he speculated, kids might not have it so bad.

“Today, you’re not the only fat kid in the class,” he said. “You’re just one of many fat kids.”

In fact, that’s just what health researchers have found. In a 2002 survey, the National Center for Health Statistics calculated that about 17 percent of children over the age of six are overweight or obese—that’s around 13.5 million children. That number has more than doubled in the last few decades. And who knows what’s happened in the years since the survey.

Having a child myself, I don’t want to believe that the blame lies solely with parents. And, in fact, I don’t think it does. Read up on the food industry—Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock or Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser—to come face to face with the powerful corporate forces that are battling us for our children’s health.

But we are not blameless. One Cornell University researcher has quantified just how much responsibility we as parents bear. In his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink examines the influence of the person in the family he calls “the nutritional gatekeeper.” That's the parent who does the menu planning, grocery shopping and cooking. Through extensive studies, Wansink found that this person is responsible for about 72 percent of a family’s food choices.

I was heartened by that number, because it means that in our own house we can control all but 28 percent of the food our child eats. But if I’m honest, I have to admit that the decisions we make aren’t always good. Grilled sausage-and-cheese sandwiches. Donuts. Cheese puffs. Pepperoni pizza. Of our own volition, we abdicate some of our responsibility on a daily basis.

I recently laid out on the kitchen table the typical foods my son eats during an average day. I checked labels, looked up nutritional information online and added up his intake of just one ingredient: sugar. I'll post the results soon.... as soon as I pick myself up off the floor!

Chips: How to eat just one (or two)

I read a fascinating article on Salon this morning about why food is so addictive. For the article, Why We Can't Eat Just One, Katherine Mieszkowski interviewed Dr. David Kessler, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatricion who has written a book titled The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite

Dr. Kessler says that that it's not a simple lack of willpower that causes us to overeat. The brain, he says, creates strong neural pathways that make it nearly impossible to resist our cravings. Every time we face an addictive food -- mostly loaded with fat, sugar and salt -- we have an internal dialog that strengthens the pathways. Something like: "Yow. That would taste good. But, no, I shouldn't. But I really want it. Maybe just a little."

Add to that the stimulus that is created by alluring food packaging and advertising, restaurant decor, lighting and music, easy access on every corner, the linking of food and entertainment and you're battling an entire environment, not just a food. And most food, he says, is "adult baby food." It goes down so easy we chew only two or three times, gulp it down, and reach for the next chip.

Chips! Why did he have to mention them?? My one weakness. After reading Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think, I've adopted his suggestion that you set "food rules" and "food prohibitions" for yourself. Rules mean you regulate the addictive food in some way, prohibitions mean you can't eat it at all.

When it comes to chips, here are my rules. I can have chips, but I can't buy them. If I have chips, I can't have dip. (That makes me eat more, plus dip has mucho calories.) If I have dip, I have to dip with veggies. When I have chips, I can't drink anything. (Thirst makes me stop sooner.)

How about you? What rules or prohibitions help you curb your cravings?

Laura Freberg: Celebrating an anniversary

Weddings, graduations, the Fourth of July... this is the time of year we enjoy celebrations of all sorts.

Laura Freberg has her own reason to celebrate. This summer marks her first anniversary on the National Weight Control Registry.

The registry tracks people who have lost weight and kept it off over time. (http://www.nwcr.ws/.) To qualify, you must be at least 18 years old, have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for one year or more. People have reported losing up to 300 pounds and keeping it off for up to 66 years.

To date, more than 6,000 people have logged their weight loss stories. Laura is one of them. A psychology professor at California Polytechnic State University, she and her daughter Karen signed up at their local Jenny Craig office in San Luis Obispo. While her daughter wanted to lose the weight she had needed as an All-American shot-putter, Laura wanted to gain control over her 5’9”, 210-pound, size 16 frame.

Once Laura and Karen received their first shipment of meals, they discovered that portion control would be a challenge for them, even with healthy food on their table.

“California is all about fresh fruit; bananas, grapes, you name it. We ate good food, just way too much of it. We’d sit down to eat a bowl of cherries that was about four times what we should be having,” Laura says.

Controlling portions and calories, the women’s weight loss was almost immediate. Karen lost 11 pounds the first week, Laura lost six. From then on, one to two pounds a week was standard.

For Laura, the decision to use a delivered meal program made weight loss almost automatic. She recalls reading Brian Wansink’s book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and being struck by his finding that people make more than 200 decisions a day about food. To her, that meant 200-plus opportunities to make the wrong choice.

“What I like most about the Jenny Craig system is that no decisions have to be made,” Laura says. “I prefer to use my time, energy, and neural activity on my work and hobbies, not thinking about food.”

Today, Laura maintains a goal weight of about 130 pounds (an 80-pound loss) and wears size 4 “Barbie-doll suits.” Congratulations, Laura! (That's Laura and her husband Roger in a 2007 photo.) To read more about Laura, check out her website at http://www.laurafreberg.com/

In another post, I'll tell you about the rest of Laura's family. Jenny Craig quickly became a way of life for the Freberg family. Together, they've lost about 275 pounds. Now, that's reason to celebrate!