Slim by Design Offers Tricks for a No Willpower Diet
According to author Brian Wansink , we make over 200 food decisions every day , and most of them don’t even think about them. Slim by Design takes Wansink’s amazing research into how we make these decisions and turns them into helpful advice.
All advice is based on research in food psychology, most of which was conducted at Wansink’s laboratory in Cornell. You know Wansink’s research even if you don’t know its name. We have many times talked about his things here at Lifehacker, for example, when we told you to use high thin wine glasses to avoid overflow , or eat an apple on the way to the grocery store , or when we let you go to the store. restaurant menu gimmicks you probably fall for . He wrote an earlier book about this research, Fooling Eating .
Wansinke’s career began with degrees in business, journalism and marketing, so he is not a nutritionist or physician, but rather a study of consumer behavior. Today, he is the director of the Cornell University Food and Brands Lab , where his team studies how factors such as lighting, plate size, and your dinner partners affect what and how much you eat.
His job is the same as that of food researchers trying to find ways to get us to buy more. It is not a conflict of interest, he argues, that companies like it when we eat less because they spend less. As an example, he presents packs of 100 calories (his invention, he claims). Wansink happily told the management of the food company that people would pay more to eat less , and he was right. On the other hand, 100-calorie packs are annoying and I wouldn’t overpay for food. (Wansink, of course, offers a solution: buy a large bag and pack it yourself.)
The book is written as a guide to the use of research findings in the field of nutritional psychology. Rather than focusing more on food choices , Wansink wants you to keep mindlessly eating, but structure your surroundings so that easy choices are best. In other words, you design the environment to make (or maintain) harmony . He summarizes philosophy like this:
For 90 percent of us, the mindless eating decision is not deliberate overeating – our life is too crazy and our willpower is too weak. Instead, the solution is to tweak the little things in our homes, favorite restaurants, supermarkets, workplaces, and schools so that we mindlessly eat less and better, not more. It’s easier to use a small plate facing away from the sideboard and spin a bread basket across the table than to be a martyr on a hunger strike. Willpower is hard and must last a lifetime. Making your life slim by design is easy.
The changes he proposes range from really simple ones, like turning your back on the buffet when choosing a seat in a restaurant, to larger jobs like reorganizing or even moving the pantry.
Who is this book for?
This book is for people who want to learn about the bizarre ways our minds work, while learning tips to help them make healthy eating easier.
Far from being a dry list of tips, this book is filled with sidebars, anecdotes, illustrations, fun facts, and best of all, stories about how food research is done. He talks about how old cameras can be inserted into tissue boxes to spy shoppers in grocery aisles, and then moves on to an even smarterdisguise based on a water bottle .
After all, Wansink is the guy who built aliteral bottomless bowl of soup to show how we rely on portion size to regulate how much we eat. This story, along with a host of other baseball insider questions about how nutritional psychology research is conducted, is covered in Wansink’s previous book, Mindless Eating . Slim by Design grew out of this when people started asking him how to apply research to everyday life.
However, the book is not limited to renovating your kitchen and office. More than half of it focuses on what restaurants, employers, grocery stores and school canteens can do to promote healthier choices (and get people to pay more for less food). He suggests that if you are serious about it, you can Volunteer to help the school’s director of nutrition renovate the cafeteria – you will be provided with sample letters and talking points. Or you can pester Taco Bell and friends on social media; it provides a handy list of social media accounts and offers hashtags.
What do you get
First, you should know that you will be reading a lot of commonplace jokes and pop culture references. Some people are annoyed by his style, so be careful. I read it more like my father’s awkward humor and find it freakishly silly. (He calls “semi-horror stand-up comedy” one of his hobbies, so if you like his style, who knows, maybe you can catch him live someday.)
The book is organized into five sections for the different areas you can operate in: home, restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, and school canteens.
Each has a 100-point card to help you assess whether the environment — say, your home — is conducive to healthy choices. You earn points, for example, for a kitchen without a TV and for keeping breakfast cereals out of sight. Scorecards also serve as handy cheat sheets because you now know to put your cereal in the cupboard. For restaurants, if you are not a restaurant owner, Wansink recommends using a scorecard as a tool to compare your favorite restaurants against each other. If the place has low ratings, you may not want to visit it that often.
The last chapter contains many tips for using the tips from the other chapters. (Hey man, we heard you love advice.) Of course there is a four-step plan:
- Determine where you eat most : your home, your two favorite restaurants, one grocery store, and your workplace and your kids’ school (if any).
- Pick one thing to change at each location . Wansink emphasizes that trying to change everything at once will almost certainly backfire.
- Ask your favorite eating places for help via social media and emails (examples given).
- Share your success . Tweet, damn it, mostly.
This section is surprisingly thoughtful and offers action plans for people who love talking to restaurant managers, as well as people who would rather passively-aggressively leave copies of workplace health articles on their boss’s desk. All school-centered action plans start with a subtle but important step – thanking the canteen manager for everything he does and offering help before criticism.
One trick you won’t succeed
Perhaps the healthiest tip is the idea that we eat better when healthy food is convenient and attractive and unhealthy food is out of sight. This is not just one clue, but a whole constellation. To paraphrase just a few of the chapters on homes and kitchens:
- Pre-cut fruits and vegetables and place them in clear containers or pouches.
- Cover all healthy leftovers with plastic, and harmful ones with foil.
- Place these bags on the most visible shelf in the refrigerator.
- Place less healthy foods on the sides and back of the refrigerator.
- Also place healthy foods in the center of your freezer, cabinets, and pantry.
While this is pretty obvious when you think about it, you probably haven’t implemented it in all areas of your kitchen. For example, have you considered wrapping aluminum foil around an ice cream container in the freezer so you don’t have to look at the label every time you open the door? I didn’t think so.
Our opinion
While this book is fascinating and I plan to implement some of the tips, there is a small problem: the title. Can we say that these design changes will make us slim? While I trust Wansinke’s single-meal experiments (such as when people poured more pasta with red sauce on red plates than white plates, and vice versa), he goes way beyond when he presents these little tricks as solutions to change your health. or body weight. long term.
Wansink takes it for granted that eating less (or healthier) at every meal will make us lose weight, but cutting calories here and there does not lead to weight loss. Almost none of his research goes beyond what happens on a single lunch or shopping trip. If fruit sales doubled in a school dining room that followed his advice, does that mean the kids are getting healthier because of it? Wansink relies on her (and our) imagination to fill in the gaps, but just because technique is supposed to make us slim doesn’t mean it actually achieves that long-term goal.
Some of his research attempts to solve long-term problems by examining the habits and differences between slim and obese people. Skinny people are more likely to take a round at a buffet table before serving themselves, for example, and are more likely to use chopsticks instead of forks. He makes sure to say that these are observational studies and that we don’t know for sure that using chopsticks causes people to lose weight (for example, it’s a correlation, not a causal relationship). But that distinction is lost when Wansink proudly announces that the Chinese buffet chain, after consulting him, now offers chopsticks by default.
This and other similar studies tickled my bullshit detector. When Wansink and his team looked out for people in the buffet, they wrote down 103 variables, from whether they put the napkin on their lap to how many times they chewed their food. And they talked about how thin people did more. But some of the results are likely coincidental. I spoke with Rebecca Goldin , a statistician at George Mason University and director of STATS.org . She shared my concern. The results are not automatically erroneous, she said, but Wansink’s team analyzed them in such a way as to easily allow false results to occur.
So take advice with a grain of salt. I’m not sure if having a blender on my kitchen counter will make me healthier (advice from a study comparing the kitchens of lean and overweight people), but I’ll happily check the entire buffet before choosing my food. Even if that’s not what made skinny customers look thin, it’s still good advice. For example, we recommended doing the same at farmers’ markets . With that caveat, I still think this is a good book. Wansink’s approach to making healthy lifestyle choices easier is far more realistic than expecting people to count calories every time they snack.
It also provides a convenient template for improving public spaces without causing controversy, such as when he was called to the aid of a school feeding director who banned chocolate milk and caught himself in hell. A few weeks later, students boycotted the lunch lines, and the city newspaper criticized her in a front page article. Wansink asked her to fetch some chocolate milk, but he put it in an awkward place, so the children had to take a twenty-second round to get it. Most weren’t worried. It is this pragmatic approach that makes Slim by Design so valuable: it takes human nature into account. This is a better plan than trying to put up with rules we don’t want to follow, or invoking willpower that we don’t have.
You can purchase Slim by Design: Powerless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life on Amazon in hardcover for $ 19 or paperback for $ 12.