Mindless Eating

Why We Eat More Than We Think

By: Brian Wansink Ph.D.

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins

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)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting, enlightening, practical advice

I enjoyed every minute of this book, and am on my third "reading". I have started eliminating the mindless eating from my diet, incorporated 4 new tactics, and find I enjoy my food (and drink) more and am increasingly aware of my hunger/satiety. A great book for those looking for lasting change. (Yes, I'm losing weight effortlessly). Love the descriptions of social experiments, and narrator's voice is easy on the ears.

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.

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.

anyone got the munchies...?

An excellent book - not a diet book in the usual sense of the word, but then I wasn't looking for a diet book. However, if you are looking for the answers as to why you reach for that second/third/fourth (delete as appropriate) biscuit then maybe this book can provide a little enlightenment. There are definitely parts of the book when you will think to yourself ''it seems so obvious now that its been explained!'' and if anyone offers you free snacks on the way into the cinema in future you will certainly think twice about the motivation. Anyhow just to conclude, the content is interesting and the narrative engaging, so if your looking for something a bit different to your usual listen, then try this book.

Some proper science and simple help

Great book. Finally a sensible approach to eating and a proper scientific insight in to what motivates us to eat.

Forget about every fad diet you've ever been on, this all makes good proper scientific sense and should work. As the author states this is not a diet book but if you listen and take it in you will no doubt understand what drives you to eat and lose weight very gently and slowly which is the only successful way.

I recommend this to anyone who is interested in proper weight loss and not just trying to get down two dress sizes for a holiday or wedding. It is also a valuable read to anyone working in health care as the information in this can help you understand why we all struggle with weight loss so much and give people some clear science based guidance.

Eye Opening

This is a very eye opening book with great experiments to back up the information presented. It's a study on how we as a society really don't think about anything anymore especially what we consume food wise. We have become animals of habit and we are nearly automated in our choices plus we also succumb to the ever increasing advertising that we see on a daily basis without giving it a second thought. I would definitely recommend this title for anyone who is ready to become more aware about their food choices and who wishes to be proactive about living a healthier lifestyle.

So much more then food

This book describes in great details why we as human do some of the things we know we should not do and how we fool our mind going so. The books focus on food, but there are so many other aspects also covered, which makes this book great.

Fascinating!

More than just a diet book! This book will be useful for anyone who is interested in thinking about their relationahip with food. The writer discusses the findings of his extensive research in an accessible and entertaining way. There are also many useful tips you can apply.

Interesting but elongated

The information given in this book was interesting but could be explained in half the amount of time. Also, the writer, Prof. BrianWansink, is quite presumptuous in how he tells others how to change their (eating) lives/habbits for the better. I understand he has done a lot of studies, and I agree with the things he is saying, but he could have done so in a more approachable, easy manner.

Great book!

This is a great book full of fantastic tips for everyone who would like to learn healthier eating habits :-)