Mindless Eating

I noticed the title of this book, Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink on Danielle Bean's blog, so when I spotted it on the new bookshelf at the local library I snatched it up. It is a combination of diet book and research study on such topics as how much people eat if their soup bowl mysteriously refills itself and if people eat more of a food with a fancy description on the menu. The results of these and other studies conducted by the author show us how we can easily be fooled into eating more and therefore gain weight. One of the studies had to do with eating favorite foods first or last.

"almost nobody ate either their favorite food or their least favorite food in the middle. The seemed to use one of two "eating strategies." They either "saved the best for last" or "ate the best one first."

...we discovered that people who ate the best one first often shared one of two characteristics: they either grew up as a youngest child or came from large families.

The people most likely to save the best for last, on the other hand, had grown up as only children or as the oldest. They could afford to save their favorite foods as a reward, knowing it would still be waiting for them at the end of the meal. It's different for children in big families, particularly of they're not the oldest. There is competition for food, even when there is plenty to eat. If you don't eat your favorite food first, you might lose out all together. Get it while you can."

I still remember being in cahoots with my mother on grocery shopping days. After the food was put away we would sneak some special treat like an huge platter of hot nachos or two entire tubes of Pringles before my brother realized they were there. He was the typical teenage boy with seemingly hollow legs, Mother could never make enough food to fill him up. On weekend mornings she would find him still comotose from his late night TV and snacking episodes, empty ice cream cartons and potato chip bags scattered around him. If there was no sweet items in the pantry he would just pull out the sugar bowl and eat heaping spoonfuls, leaving nothing for the next person who wanted a sprinkling on their cereal.

For a long time I would chow down after grocery shopping to mimic this childhood behavior. However, since now I have a husband who is content with only one comfort food: Breyers ice cream, the rest is left alone. I do realize though that in a few short years I will have several teenage boys in the house who might have inherited their uncle's hollow legs.