What Causes us To Overeat
By Mark on Dec 1, 2008 in Featured
There can be quite a few reasons for overeating, such as emotional eating, or just the mere taste of certain foods, or just plain and simple habits that we have picked up over the years.
And not realised consciously that we eat a particular way some factors may include, the size of a food packaging or people around us can affect how much we eat, sometimes if you have large friends it is possible to pick up their eating habits and transfer them to yourself without even realising it.
In a book called Mindless Eating which is written by Brian Wansink, and is involved in a department within Cornell University, which has conducted various experiments to try and understand the psychology of why we eat the way we do.
The experiments were centered around the size of food packaging and also outside influences of other people, some of the things that they found out from, their data was, that large portions of food can be cheaper so we tend to buy more of them, whereas smaller portions of food tend to be that bit more expensive so we eat less smaller portions.
During his experiments he found that we tend to be influenced by the name on the packaging, and also specifically by the size of it, one experiment which involved popcorn gave participants different sizes large and medium-sizes were used for the experiment, the popcorn was five days old.
Once the movie was over they measured the amount of popcorn that was consumed and interestingly enough, the people have had the large popcorn size eight approximately 53 percent more, than those whom had the smaller size of popcorn. They came to the conclusion that three factors were involved in eating the popcorn these influential factors were other people eating the popcorn in close proximity, the actual associations in their mind with going to a movie and eating it and also the distraction of it. Also bear in mind that the popcorn used was stale.
Another experiment revolved around using a soup bowl, one group had a bottomless soup bowl, which was topped up and soup in it most of the time, while another group had normal soup bowls.
Here again we have differences in both experiments the bottomless soup bowl group ate considerably more than the other group. But when asked about calorie consumption, they said that they thought they had both eaten the same amount when in fact they hadn’t.
They also noted that people near to us or nearby whom are eating also can have a plus factor when it comes to eating food, not plus as in positive but we tend to match them probably more subconsciously than anything. This can go either way we can either eat more or less depending upon the environmental conditions and where we are.
Wansink found that people who become overweight or obese, very often not aware of how much they are eating and the amounts that they should be eating, he says that we should become more aware of what we are eating rather than just being mindless with our eating.
This is what causes the consumption of too many calories throughout the day, his tips for eating less are eat no more than two items if you are at a buffet, wrap foods in tinfoil to make them seem less appealing. Don’t eat foods directly from packets and if you sit near to somebody make sure they are eating their food slowly. This isn’t the be all and end all of losing weight, but hopefully these tips will help you and make you understand how sometimes that we have habits going on beneath the surface, particularly subconsciously ones in the way we do things especially when it comes to eating food.
Source http://www.naturalnews.com
Tags: food
