Diets don’t work, but these strategies will
OBSTACLES: Make treats hard to reach and eat the veggies first
Longtime eating researcher Traci Mann knows the unbecoming truth about diets: They don’t actually work.
After more than 20 years studying how people eat, Mann has found that willpower doesn’t work quite as we imagine, and our bodies are predisposed to maintain a weight that often doesn’t fit the ideal we aspire to achieve.
But while diets may not work the way we want them to, there are at least two strategies for eating less unhealthy food and more healthy food that have been shown to work pretty well.
“The whole second half of my book (Secrets from the Eating Lab) actually talks about strategies for eating and losing weight that don’t require willpower,” says Mann, who conducted much of her research at the University of Minnesota’s Health and Eating Lab.
“There are strategies that are easier to do without going on a diet that is ultimately going to fail.
First, she says, focus on creating obstacles to eating bad food.
“The reason obstacles work is because we are lazy,” Mann says. “An obstacle will slow us down, if not stop us entirely.
“There’s this one study from my colleagues’ eating lab in the Netherlands where she showed that if you have a bowl of M&Ms on the table next to you, you’ll eat a lot of them,” Mann says. “If you move it across the room, however, you’ll eat roughly half as many. You’ve got to stop what you’re doing and get up and walk across the room.
“But even a smaller obstacle than that — a much smaller one in fact — will work just as well.
“If you just move that bowl of candy two feet across the table, so it’s still on the table but you have to extend your arm to reach it, you’ll eat as few as when it’s across the room.
“So even the smallest of obstacles slow you down. Is it going to get you to eat no M&Ms? No. But I don’t think the goal should be to eat zero M&Ms. The goal should be to not eat as many. You need to live your life, so you should get to have a little candy.”
Second, she says, make it easier to eat healthy food. An example would be what Mann calls the “get alone with a vegetable” strategy.
Normally, vegetables will lose in competition with all the other delicious food on your plate. Vegetables might not lose that battle for everyone, but they do for most of us.
This strategy puts vegetables in a competition they can win, Mann says, by pitting vegetables against no food at all.
To do that, you just eat your vegetable first before any of the other food is there. Eat them before other food is even at your table. And that way, you get them when you’re hungriest and unable to pick something else.
“We’ve actually tested this in a lot of ways,” Mann says. “And it works unbelievably well.
“We tested it with kids in school cafeterias, where it more than quadrupled the amount of vegetables eaten. I tested it with the students in my class last fall. Not only did it increase the amount of vegetables they ate, but it decreased the amount of calories they ate without trying to.
“The strategies are kind of like this. And they work. It’s not about resisting yummy stuff. It’s not about going on a diet that is bound to fail.
“It’s just about making it a little harder to make the wrong choices, and a little easier to make the right ones.”