Tricks of the trade
Eric Muth is a sucker for Twizzlers. So, to prevent his sweet tooth from overruling his health sense, his wife knows not to throw them in the grocery cart. “There’s always a food gatekeeper in the house,” says Muth, a psychology professor at Clemson University who studies eating-behavior interventions. But while some strategies to improve your diet — ahem, not buying trigger foods — go without saying, other tricks go deeper than calorie-counting and willpower to focus on less-conscious aspects of unhealthy eating. Here’s how you can use the latest findings to your health benefit:
Count your bites
If you step on a scale and don’t like what you see, there’s nothing you can do in the moment to budge the number. But with a pedometer, or Muth and colleagues’ newly on-the-market ELMM watch, which tracks how many bites you take based on a wrist motion associated with eating, you can instantly make a change toward a goal. His team’s research has shown that receiving such feedback leads people to take fewer bites and eat less. “You don’t need an extreme diet to change your weight,” says Muth, who eats about 80 bites a day. “You just say, ‘I’m going to take three less bites every time I eat.'”
Embrace your lazy
Another reason the bite-counter helps some people eat less is because the device needs to be worn and turned on and off before and after each meal. That extra step can deter people from snacks or extra helpings, the same way keeping the bag of chips in the kitchen after you take a serving to the couch might hold you back from reaching for more.
Slice and dice
One of Muth’s lab participants wanted to lose weight but didn’t want to give up caramels. So, she allowed herself one chew each night, but cut it into two pieces before savoring it. Such attention to and appreciation for each bite is associated with weight loss, and doubling those pieces seems to help, too. One of Muth’s studies, for instance, found that people who received 16 pieces of Jell-O believed they ate more than those who ate the same amount in nine pieces. “If you have a small French fry … versus a steak fry, you’re always going to judge those [small] fries as more because there’s more white space between the fries,” he explains.
Target hunger
The Volumetrics Diet emphasizes bulky foods, the Atkins Diet favors protein-packed options and the glycemic-index diet focuses on foods that steady blood sugar. All those types of foods, plus those high in fiber, are proven to help curb hunger, but few diets combine them all, says Susan Roberts, senior scientist and director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University. “These diets that focus on one thing … they’re not hitting all of the biological signals [related to hunger],” she says. That’s why her lab created the iDiet, a program whose menus incorporate all four aspects of satiety. As a result, followers actually reduce hunger and cravings, her (independently validated) research has shown.
Eat foods you like
Ask a steak-and-eggs lover to adopt a kale-and-wheatberry diet, and you’ve essentially asked her to fail. “We’re supposed to enjoy food,” Roberts says. That’s why the iDiet offers recipes for indulgences including macaroni and cheese, ice cream sundaes and hot dogs that are made with strategically satisfying (and healthy) ingredients. The sundae recipe, for example, calls for sugar-free ice cream mixed with a high-fiber cereal. “It’s amazingly good,” Roberts says. Even better, MRIs of the diet’s followers have shown that their brains’ reward centers become more sensitive to healthy, lower-calorie foods over time. “People learn to prefer healthy foods and be less tempted by junk food,” Roberts says.
Accept displeasure
While depriving yourself of your favorite foods isn’t a well-supported strategy for long-term weight loss, it is important to recognize that refusing some tempting choices is worth the momentary displeasure. And, as it turns out, that mentality can be acquired by, for example, practicing accepting conflicting feelings or focusing on the values that inspire you to be healthy, finds research by Evan Forman, a psychology professor at Drexel University. “One can have a choice between watermelon and ice cream and anticipate that the latter will provide much more pleasure, but still opt for the first choice,” he says. “In other words, one can accept a lesser state of pleasure.”
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