This is a blog post by Ferntree Gully Personal Training expert, Grant Lofthouse.
Imagine…It’s movie night.
As you file into the theatre, a nice man hands you a giant bucket of free popcorn. He says it’s some kind of theatre promotion. Well, that’s cool!
As you settle into your seat and the lights go down, you dig in to your popcorn.
Your first few bites don’t really taste that great — the fluffy kernels are kind of chewy and tough, like little salty nuggets of shoe leather. You notice but don’t really mind; you’re paying too much attention to the film to really care what it tastes like.
Everyone around you is making happy crunching noises. The air smells like warm butter. You get into a good regular rhythm of fist-to-mouth, and before you know it, your fingernails scrape the bottom of the bucket.
Little do you know that the popcorn you just finished is a week old.
Turns out you’re a lab rat in a food researcher’s experiment, and you’ve just proven a point about how our environment affects our eating: You ate a large bucket of stale popcorn simply because it was there.
You were immersed in pleasant sounds and smells, you were distracted, and other people were doing the same thing.
Busted!
(Don’t feel too badly; everyone else ate it too. Which is part of the problem, really.)
Experiments like this (yes, it was a real experiment!) have shown us that our environment affects our eating habits more than we’d think.
For instance, a series of experiments, formal and informal shows that:
* We eat more from bigger dishes than smaller ones. And if the bowl is endlessly refilled, we’ll just keep on eating.
* We’re more likely to stop for a snack if we enter our homes through the kitchen door rather than the front door.
* We’ll eat until the plate, package, or container is empty (even if that container is a giant bucket of days-old popcorn).
* We’ll eat nearly one-third more food while watching TV compared to no TV.
In other words, we’re strongly influenced by cues and stimuli from the people, things, and overall environment around us.
The good news for you is that you can change your habits by changing your environment.
And you don’t have to join a monastery or evict your family — even small changes to your environment can make a big difference.
In fact, changing the environment is one of the best ways to change your eating and your body, because it requires only a one-time investment.
So today and onward, stay aware of what you’re seeing, doing, and experiencing when you eat.
Look around your home and workplace and see if you can spot the cues that shape your behaviour, thoughts, feelings, and routines.
Talk soon,
Grant
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