This Book Is A Must-Read!

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I read Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by the brilliant Brian Wansink a few years ago and was blown away by some of the creatively-clever and often mischievous experiments he and his colleagues in the Food and Brand Laboratory at Cornell University played on often-unsuspecting 'victims' to prove how mindless we can be when choosing what and how much we eat! Being a soup aficionado the Bottomless Soup Bowl Study was my all-time favourite!

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And now he is back with Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life which reveals a great deal more and is a fascinating read... here are a couple of his observations from the book...

"For 90 percent of us, the solution to mindless eating is not mindful eating - our lives are just too crazy and our willpower’s to wimpy. Instead, the solution is to tweak small things in our homes, favorite restaurants, supermarkets, workplaces and schools so we mindlessly eat less and better instead of more. It’s easier to use a small plate, face away from the buffet and Frisbee-spin the bread basket across the table than to be a martyr on a hunger strike. Willpower is hard and has to last a lifetime. Rearranging your life to be slim by design is easy.... 

This book is about solutions - concrete, actionable solutions that my Lab has developed, tested, analyzed and tweaked in dozens of towns across the United States and abroad. This book shows how you can help your kids eat better, control your eating at restaurants, shop like a slim person and eat less at home without having to think twice. In other words, it specifically shows how you can help yourself and your family become slim by design. But equally important, this book will show you how to get all of these places and people around you to help."

Is October the Best Month to Start a Diet?

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Well, as far as one study is concerned, it could be! The world-renowned eating behavior expert and author of the brilliant Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink teamed up with two other respected researchers to record the daily weight change in 2924 participants over a 12 month period from three countries (United States, Germany and Japan) and discovered that the participants' weight rose over the Christmas/New Year period plus in all three countries there was significant weight gain around other major holidays.  Overall, weight increase was between 0.5kg and 0.8kg and whilst around half the weight gained was often lost after all the recorded holidays, the other half tended to remain for many months.

Whilst the researchers concluded that greater self-control during holidays was clearly the route for all, they determined that this was not always easy so best advice is to do everything we can to ensure that we head into ANY holiday period at a healthy weight, which makes October an excellent month to make a few resolutions and get started on a weight loss journey in the lead up to the Christmas and New Year holiday and party season!

click here for 20 diet and lifestyle changes to get you started!