Want a Burger for Lunch?

With a picture of it in front of you it will be harder to say NO!.

According to research the average person makes over 200 food choices per day. Wow. Did you realize how many times a day you have food on your mind? What to eat, how, when, where, how much, and so on? Or is it on your mind?

Now how many of these choices are you aware of making?

When I many years ago first started my career in marketing, I was curious about the unconscious mind and the hidden ways of persuasion. In studies they added one nanosecond glimpse of a beverage into a movie; too fast for the conscious mind to pick up, but not for the unconscious mind. The result: spectators bought more soda!

The Extra Pounds.

Many of us, especially in a stressed environment, do not eat when we are hungry. We either eat, when there is an opportunity to, we don't eat at all and ignore the hunger, or we snack all day instead of eating a meal and many wait until we get home at night and over indulge. Any of this sound familiar? You are probably well on your way to gaining pounds and not know why and how at the end of the year. It just snuck up on you and all of a sudden you are 10 lbs heavier. Well, just an extra 100 calories per day can add up to 10 lbs per year of more weight on your body.

Brian Wansink, Ph.D. has extensively research our behavior and why we eat more than we think.

The Nature of Hunger

We, as human beings, are designed so that survival is of utmost importance to our bodies. It is ingrained in our tissue that our unconscious will make us act accordingly. This means that our instincts are responsible for signaling the body: you see and smell food, your body turns on the hunger signals. Even if you were not necessarily hungry right before. This is another reason why you get triggered to want to eat while walking by the kebab stand on the corner, even if you don't like or want kebab. It can still turn on your "searching" for food reflexes.

The Great Big Food Traps.

In his book Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink speaks of study after study which proves how the human mind gets tricked by labels, words, yummy descriptions, and advertising. Granted we already intelligently know that we cannot trust what we so-call "learn" through advertising as it is NOT reliable health information, though they would like us to think so. But that does not matter unless we really pay attention. Our mind will make us eat what is labeled as healthy, without further scruples. We cannot trust our mind to be in charge when making choices unless we are in an aware and conscious state.

A few culprits to adding the extra mindless calories:

Time spent eating. The average lunch meal in a fast food restaurant takes 11 minutes, in a workplace cafeteria 13 minutes, and at a moderately priced restaurant 28 minutes.

Serving sizes. The size they give you is what you will consider a serving size. That is not the case. We know this in our mindful minds, but our stomach does not.

Serving size illusions. When a little food is on a big plate your mind gets triggered to think you are getting less food than if the same amount of food was on a smaller plate.

Too many choices. Variety makes us eat more. The buffet table and the salad bar can be traps for overeating.

See-food. When you see it you want it. So move things out of sight. Like the office cookies that you pass by everyday, or the bowl of chocolates on your desk.

Who me? Who is eating? When you are on email, watching TV or driving. You are not mindful of how much you are eating. Your mind is elsewhere.

Healthy choice. That might be the name or the tag-line on the label, but it does not mean that you eat less calories. Or that it is really healthy. But we tend to believe the word "healthy" if it is there.

Sounds yummy. Your brain decides in advance if you are going to yummy this food up. So if it sounds great on the menu you will probably eat it all up.