Mindless Eating

When do you stop eating?
When the food runs out? When you feel full?
Too often I do not pay close attention to the fullness factor.

Recently I read the book, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, and the insights therein have taught me much and reminded me of a number of suggestions for greater health. For example, these words:

“As the psychologists have demonstrated, most of us allow external, and mostly visual, cues to determine how much we eat…
Supposedly it takes twenty minutes before the brain gets the word that the belly is full; unfortunately most of us take considerably less than twenty minutes to finish a meal, with the result that the sensation of feeling full exerts little if any influence on how much we eat. What this suggests is that eating more slowly, and then consulting our sense of satiety, might help us to eat less. The French are better at this than we are, as Brian Wansink discovered when he asked a group of French people how they knew when to stop eating. “When I feel full,” they replied. (What a novel idea! The Americans said things like “When my plate is clean” or “When I run out.”)…
Wansink offers dozens of helpful tips in a recent book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think…

Serve smaller portions on smaller plates;
serve food and beverages from small containers (even if this means repackaging things bought in jumbo sizes);
leave detritus on the table – empty bottles, bones, and so forth – so you can see how much you’ve eaten or drunk;
use glasses that are more vertical than horizontal (people tend to pour more into squat glasses);
leave healthy foods in view, unhealthy ones out of view;
leave serving bowls in the kitchen rather than on the table to discourage second helpings.”
P 193-194 In Defense of Food