But what's the evidence that it does affect everyone, and not just suckers?
I've heard people say: "Well, come on. Something like this can affect the uninformed, but it's not going to influence someone who is intelligent and well-informed." And that's seems like a good point.
So, as an experiment, we took a bunch of really intelligent people -- MBA graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- competitive students who had gotten into graduate school. I spent 90 minutes informing them that if they serve from a big bowl, they're going to take more than if they serve from a medium bowl. I demonstrated it. I lectured about it. I showed them a video about it. I even broke them into discussion groups so that they could discuss ways they could prevent it from happening to them. I did everything short of an interpretive dance.
Then, they went away for a holiday break. When they came back I invited them to a Super Bowl party at the end of January, six weeks later. As they came to the party they went to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given a bowl, but sitting in front of them was two large, gallon bowls of Chex Mix. Then, they served themselves, and we weighed how much they'd taken.
We did this in a very sneaky way. We handed them something that they had to fill out, so they had to put their plate down, and there was a scale, concealed by a tablecloth, underneath where they put their plate. At the same time, 20 of their colleagues were going through a different room that had four medium half-gallon bowls of Chex Mix. So, instead of large bowls they served from medium-size bowls, but it's the same total volume of Chex Mix.
When people served themselves from the huge bowls, they served themselves 53 percent more Chex Mix. Now, these were smart people and they were very well informed. In fact, six weeks earlier we'd spent 90 minutes drilling them over and over and over again about how big bowls cause you to pour more. So, after the Super Bowl was over we weighed how much they'd actually eaten, and the people who served from the huge bowls ate 57 percent more.
When we said, "Hey, here's what's happened. We told you guys about this six weeks ago, why did you get fooled?" people were still unwilling to say that the size of the bowl fooled them. They'll deny it until they're blue in the face. They say: "Oh, well, yeah, I was really hungry today," or "I skipped lunch," or "It smelled really good." They'll say anything but that bowl could have possibly influenced them.
You're saying that because people don't believe that they can be fooled by these cues, you can't even educate them out of it?
That's absolutely correct. Instead of letting cues lead you to eat more, you need to reverse these cues so that they work for you rather than against.
How can you reverse them?
You can use smaller serving bowls. You can use smaller plates. You can move the candy dish just 6 feet away from you, rather than 3 feet. You can use tall, skinny glasses, instead of short wide glasses. You can put the serving bowl in the kitchen, rather than leaving it on the table family-style, which is what most people do.
You can also eat out of a dish, and not out of a package, because we eat with our eyes; if we eat out of a huge package we don't really know when we're done. But if we pre-plate or pre-pour things we have a better idea as to what we really have eaten.
We're now in the middle of a season of overeating, which is typically followed by an orgy of diet vows right after New Year's. What are some ways people can get through this season without gaining a ton of weight, but also without missing out on the fun of the holidays?
One strategy is to use the rule of two. We know that variety causes you to eat too much food. So, anytime you're at a holiday buffet, go to the buffet as many times as you want -- but on any given trip never put more than two types of foods on your plate.
If you say: "Hey, look they have cantaloupe, and they have brownies." You can put as much cantaloupe on your plate and as many brownies on your plate as you want to that first time, but you can't put anything else. And then, if you want to go back a second time, you can do the exact same thing, but you might want to pick two different foods, like the water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and the peppermint ice cream. But you can't put anything else on your plate. You can have as much of those two items as you want to, but you can't put anything else.
What we find is that putting two items on your plate is kind of boring. People will do it, but because it's much more boring than piling your plate with 20 items, people end up eating a lot less. Our studies show they end up eating 27 to 28 percent less food.
What about managing big family holiday meals?
If the way you show love to grandmother or your mother or aunt is to make sure you eat their special family recipe, one key is to take small amounts, but do it frequently. Rather than put a big 1,000-calorie pile of dressing on your plate, put a little bit on at a time, and eat that -- that way you can always have something on your plate, and you can always say: "Hey, I think I'm going to have some more dressing. That is really great." What your host is going to remember isn't the fact that you only put a teaspoon on the first time. They're going to remember that you went back for seconds and thirds.
Next page: "When I go to a restaurant, I don't really want to know how many calories are in my meal"
