I am taking my culinary medicine certification from Tulane University.  Culinary medicine is the field of medicine that focuses in on foods that cause disease and ways to use food to cure disease.  Take diabetes for example.  Many people following a diabetic diet can often be on fewer medications, live longer and healthier lives.  Also, I am glad that there is a field of medicine that doesn’t just use pills to treat disease.

I have just read Brian Wasink’s Mindless Eating (available in Paperback through Amazon).  I have to read a lot to stay current as a medical doctor and rarely find what I read completely useful.  Granted, I usually learn a couple of new things when I read a journal article or book, but I have to read a lot before I am blown away by information that I can personally use as well as my patients.  Mindless Eating is one of those rare books.  Brian Wasink is a food behavior researcher and has completed many research projects to determine what triggers our eating behaviors.  The simple me would say that we only eat when we are hungry but we stop when we are full.  If this were the case, then I don’t think we would be having the obesity epidemic that we are having or why I have a daily battle with food.

Wasink asserts that we already have three-strikes against us:  continual food advertising, fast food outlets that outnumber grocery stores and sit down restaurants, and the increased portion sizes that we’ve all become accustomed.  Also, foods, especially fast foods are designed for us to crave them and overeat.

From Brian Wasink’s website he summarizes well why it is hard for us to lose weight:

Most of us don’t overeat because we’re hungry. We overeat because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers.

Our studies show that the average person makes around 250 decisions about food every day – breakfast or no breakfast? Pop-tart or bagel? Part of it or all of it? Kitchen or car? Yet out of these 200+ food decisions, most we cannot really explain. Mindless Eating shows what these decisions are and how to make them work for you rather than against you.

The big takeaway from this book for me was eating while being distracted by other things including computer, iPad and TV.  Now, with technology, there are more ways to be distracted during eating so that you eat more than you would consciously eat without the multiple invasions.

Another gem is that diets that limit or take away certain foods (think Paleo, Atkins) are difficult to stick with and for 95% of the people doing them, do not lead to sustained weight loss; most people gain all of the weight back.  Small changes that add up to 100 calories less or burning 100 calories more per day lead to sustained weight loss that can amount to 30 pounds lost in a year!

If you want more tips for long-term weight loss success, read here.  Or check out Mindlesseating.org for more information.