How Your Environment Impacts Your Diet By: Noah Renz, Masters Nutrition and Human Performance ENVIRONMENT Have you ever thought about how your environment has shaped the person you are today? Whether you like it or not, you are being constantly formed with small little unnoticeable nudges all around you. Many things influence the way you eat, such as the people you surround yourself with, the community you live in, the type of job you have, and the size of plates that you use. All these seemingly inconsequential factors around us are nudging us in the direction we want to go or subconsciously sabotaging our goals. MINDLESS EATING There was a study that showed how the convenience of the food around us affects how much we are likely to eat. In the study, they gave everyone transparent, lid sealed dishes full of candies that were rotated among three locations in their (the secretaries) office. During the first week, a secretary would find that her dish was on the corner of her desk. During the second week, it would be in the top left-hand desk drawer. During the third and final week, it would be on a file cabinet six feet from her desk. Other secretaries would be given their chocolates in a different order, but the three places were always the same – on the desk, in the desk drawer, and six feet from the desk. Typically, a secretary ate about nine candies a day if they were sitting on her desk staring right at her. That is about 225 extra calories per day. If she had to go to the effort of opening the desk drawer, she did so only six times per day. If she had to get up and walk six feet to get a candy, she only ate four. It’s not always worth the effort to walk six feet for a candy! The basic principle is convenience. Simply moving the chocolate dish to an inconvenient spot caused the secretaries to eat less. Simple! YOUR ENVIRONMENT This is why “cleaning” out your kitchen can be helpful at times. The less “tempting” food you have in your house or in your sight the less you will eat. You won’t have to fight it, you don’t have to rely on willpower, it happens naturally. Here are some simple tricks to unconsciously eat less (stolen from “Mindless Eating”) 1. Make healthy foods convenient and unhealthy foods VERY inconvenient. 2. Eat on a smaller plate with small utensils. Even better, eat with chopsticks. 3. Eat without distraction. No TV, no newspaper, no smartphone, just you and your food. 4. Don’t eat out of the package, portion out your snack and take it to the other room. For this challenge, you probably shouldn’t be eating out of too many packages anyways unless they are baby carrots. In that case, eat your fill. 5. Dish up once then go to the table leaving the extra food on the stove or in the other room. 6. Don’t have food sitting out on your counter unless you want to eat more of it like vegetables. 7. Eat slower and stop when you feel satisfied. Only make a decision after 20 minutes since your last bite if you need to go back for more. Our environment has a profound effect on how we eat. If you can start making some changes to your environment that make healthy eating the easy unconscious choice (put cut up veggies on the table) and processed foods the hard conscious choice (you need to leave the house to get it) then success will come even easier for you. Notice and pay attention to your environment and see if you can make a small change today. *Study reference: “Mindless Eating” by Brian Wansink, Hay House
