• Mindless Eating

  • Why We Eat More Than We Think
  • By: Brian Wansink Ph.D.
  • Narrated by: Marc Cashman
  • Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (869 ratings)

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Mindless Eating  By  cover art

Mindless Eating

By: Brian Wansink Ph.D.
Narrated by: Marc Cashman
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Publisher's summary

In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you’re eating, what you’re eating - or why you’re even eating at all.

  • Does food with a brand name really taste better?
  • Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did?
  • Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel?
  • How much would you eat if your soup bowl secretly refilled itself?
  • What does your favorite comfort food really say about you?
  • Why do you overeat so much at healthy restaurants?

Brian Wansink is a Stanford Ph.D. and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. He’s spent a lifetime studying what we don’t notice: the hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat. Using ingenious, fun, and sometimes downright fiendishly clever experiments like the “bottomless soup bowl,” Wansink takes us on a fascinating tour of the secret dynamics behind our dietary habits.

How does packaging influence how much we eat? Which movies make us eat faster? How does music or the color of the room influence how much we eat? How can we recognize the “hidden persuaders” used by restaurants and supermarkets to get us to mindlessly eat? What are the real reasons most diets are doomed to fail? And how can we use the “mindless margin” to lose - instead of gain - 10 to 20 pounds in the coming year?

Mindless Eating will change the way you look at food, and it will give you the facts you need to easily make smarter, healthier, more mindful and enjoyable choices at the dinner table, in the supermarket, in restaurants, at the office - even at a vending machine - wherever you decide to satisfy your appetite.

©2006 Brian Wansink (P)2006 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"Entertaining...Isn't so much a diet book as a how-to on better facilitating the interaction between the feed-me messages of our stomachs and the controls in our heads." (Publishers Weekly)

“[Mindless Eating] does more than just chastise those of us guilty of stuffing our faces. It also examines the effectiveness of such popular diets as South Beach or Atkins, and offers useful tips to consciously eat nutritiously.” (Boston Herald)

What listeners say about Mindless Eating

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Mindless Reading

I'd hoped for insights on more deeply psychological reasons for mindless eating, and tips for overcoming mindless eating. Alas, this is mostly just a recitation of the author's numerous field and academic studies proving (or attempting to prove) that packaging, portion size, relative dish or bowl or glass sizes, and the like affect the amounts people eat and drink. Only near the very end does he address how to cope with these variables, but it's pretty obvious by then. My main gripe is the excess of needlessly detailed and repetitive study data going to prove a few not very original or helpful points about what makes people misjudge portion sizes and, as a result, overeat. Would have made an okay 4-page magazine article; maybe that's how it started? Certainly the tone of the book reflects the stale cliches and puffy and quickly dated pop culture references one expects in popular magazine writing--and the result sounds stiff and insincere. Sorry, the topic does not merit and the style does not suit a book of this length.

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78 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Ty
  • 04-10-10

Frustrating book on a lot of levels...

I liked the premise of the book, but found actually listening to it frustrating on a lot of levels. He spends a lot of time on specific food interactions, but never really steps back to look at the question of why people are having such strong food cravings and eating so much junk food. Advice like "if you eat one fewer donuts per day that adds up to losing 20 lbs a year" doesn't really do much for me. He also doesn't really seem to examine whether the people who avoid junk food by not walking through the kitchen when they got home didn't go back later. The book also suffers from the author's conviction that pretty much all weight gain and food related issues arise from the context of people's day to day interactions with food. The obesity epidemic had a physical beginning in the early 1980s and if you were to take this book literally you'd have to assume that this was entirely due to secretaries moving their candy jars from 6 feet away to 3 feet away and more people entering their home through the kitchen rather than the garage, combined with increasing the size of dinner plates and using short wide glasses rather than tall thin ones. I'd suggest that rather than studying what makes a person eat 30 M&Ms vs 50, the author should start to work on studying how to get rid of these cravings. You can move a bowl of candy further away from you, but you're deluding yourself if you think you'll lose much weight with a bowl of candy around to begin with.

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17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Best diet book on the market

Any additional comments?

I've read every Michael Pollan book (in defense of food, omnivours dilemma, cooked), Gary taubes book (why we get fat, good calories bad calories), Skinny Bitch, Jungle Effect, Rethinking Thin, Eat More Weigh Less, Atkins, South Beach. I had been obese for 15 years. I've been thin for almost two years now with a BMI of 23 and body fat of 8 percent. My BMI is the same as Lance Armstrongs in his prime. That being said, this book is as close to the most perfect diet book I've ever read. It gives solid advice and explains a lot. It explains why low carb works then stops working. It explains why we eat too much. But also, it entertains. The science is sound. The studies are interesting. The reading is good. Skip all the other books. Drink a few protein shakes and read this book.

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Valuable information for anyone who eats.

Its pretty long, but an easy listen. The narrator is pleasant and there is a bit of relaxed humor tossed in. I found the descriptions of the food studies long enough for validation, but brief enough to keep things moving along. The results are some tips that everyone can incorprate into their lives to keep on top of the battle of the bulge:)
Most importantly, this book gives tips for lifestyle changes that can be permanent. Enough fad diet books already out there!(They don't work.)

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Strategies and Tactics for Taking Control

I understand where Jim from Laredo was coming from; the author largely avoids the deeper philosophical implications of his work in exchange for a tighter focus on tactics. Read this book in order to begin to understand your eating and to begin to take control of the "mindless" portion of it.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Psychology theory, not a dieter's book

I was intrigued by the title because I thought the book could give me tips for weight loss. Why do I eat what I do? What can I do to change it? The book is a very good psychology theory book on why we eat what we do and backs up those findings with live studies performed by college professors and students. The findings are real and make sense, but if you're looking for quick weight loss tips or several chapters to help you with uncontrolled eating, this is not the book for you. I was looking for tips on weight loss and found some nuggets of wisdom (and common sense) buried in lots of data and studies. I rated this book relatively highly because, as a former psychology student, I did enjoy hearing about the studies and their results. But if I was just looking for quick diet answers, this book would have been disappointing to me.
In a nutshell,
- Think about the mindless things you eat out of habit. The author, Brian, provides the rule of thumb that you should take a "0" off the end of the calorie count of some snack you habitually eat and that will be the weight you will gain in a year if you continue that habit. For example, if you eat a snack every night that has 100 calories, in a year you will have gained 10 pounds. The reverse, he says, is also true. If you cut out a snack every night that has 100 calories, you will lose 10 pounds if your calorie intake is otherwise balanced.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

do not buy this!!!unless it becomes abridged.

What disappointed you about Mindless Eating?

This guy is a world authority.I fully respect him and his devotion to proven facts.However there was very little information I could use on a daily practical level that wasn't obvious.
The advice contained is pretty obvious:understand portion size;reduce size of your plate and glass,eat slowly,order your dessert after you have eaten,eat the junk stuff if you have worked out that day.Understand calories and how easy it is to get the wrong.
This could easily be summarised in to a 1 hour book that would make interesting.It was tedious to get through;I can not recommend this to anyone except someone who is a food psychologist who is marketing food products.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Very funny and interesting

What you will not find in this book is advice how to eat and diet better. What you will find are examples - supported by several studies - how people choose their food. It's really astonishing how details influence what and how much we eat. Knowing that, one could choose the meals better, provided we always think before we choose.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

this is too long of example after example....

This audio is forever!!! many many examples of sizes and how how to re-package, serve things up in smaller dishes... this didnt tell me anything new. I think it was okay ... i learn quickly so this was too long for me.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Socially Engineered To Eat!

The concept that stayed with me from the first time I read this book back in 2011 was that: 100 calories per day = 10 pounds per year. To this day that lingers when I am tempted to have a snack but I’m not that hungry, or when I’m looking for some motivation to take one more walk around the block.

I decided to pick the book up again to see if any other helpful tid-bits would implant themselves in my mind, and I came away with a reminder to always be aware of JUST HOW MUCH we are being Socially Engineered to eat crap-food… and way too much of it!

I didn’t find this book as interesting as I did when I first read it, but it’s not because the subject matter is boring – it’s just that I think in general we are all increasingly aware the of the Food Industry’s constant (and sometimes insidious) manipulations of our relationship to food as well as our own personal motivators and so there was not much new in here for me on this second go-round.

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2 people found this helpful