" Losing weight by minding your ‘danger zone’"
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A common dietary danger zone: the candy bowl on your desk. If you find your hand constantly dipping into it, try moving the bowl to a different location (like someone else’s desk).
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By Ellen Warren
/ Chicago Tribune
Last modified: October 13. 2011 6:05AM PST
How’s this for some great news? By making one, tiny, almost painless change, you can lose 10 to 20 pounds in a year.
By making that single change, you can put an end to the cycle of what Brian Wansink, a Cornell University professor who has made a career of studying people’s real eating habits, calls “creeping calories.”
“The same levers that almost invisibly lead you to slowly gain weight can also be pushed in the other direction to just as invisibly lead you to slowly lose weight — unknowingly,” writes Wansink in his eye-opening book, “Mindless Eating.”
For each of you reading this, there is a single behavior change that can make all the difference and result in a weight loss with none of that deprived, angry feeling that you know so well (if you’re a dieter).
The catch? That one small change varies for each person, depending on your special “dietary danger zone,” Wansink said.
To find yours, you’ll have to experiment.
For Wansink, using a smaller dinner plate to make his portions look bigger was a key to mindless weight loss because his danger zone was overeating at mealtime.
Another example? Wansink found that snackers who had to walk 6 feet to the candy dish ate less than half as much as those who kept the dish in plain sight on their own desks.
If eating meals at your desk or in the car is your danger zone, brown bag it from home or only eat when the car is in park.
Some other tips from Wansink:
• Keep tempting foods out of sight.
• Set your fork down between bites.
• Ask the waiter not to bring bread.
• Alternate water every other drink.
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