Mindf#cking lose weight

Geschatte leestijd: 6 minutenThinking you’re eating more than what’s actually on your plate. Victor Mids gave some mindf#cking weight loss tips on New Year’s Eve. Let’s fact-check.

Mindf#cking Weight Loss

We already knew that there are many factors influencing our appetite. How hungry you are is, of course, an important regulator of how much food you eat. Managing hunger is often used as a tool for weight loss. Much scientific research has focused on the hunger hormone leptin, for example, and pharmaceutical solutions are being sought for the problem of obesity.

One of the factors influencing your hunger is the amount of food you think you’re eating. Your brain translates the visual input from the eyes (and nose) into data about the amount of energy you’ve consumed, even before signals from the stomach provide this information. You can cleverly use this time difference.

In the New Year’s Eve show of Mindf#ck, Victor Mids gives an example showing that you can also eat more by using this principle. For example, by letting unsuspecting restaurant visitors consume a few liters of soup by secretly refilling it through a reservoir in the plates. Customers see a normal soup plate and associate it with the normal amount of soup. Three-quarters of an hour after the start of the ‘starter,’ they begin to realize that the plate doesn’t seem to empty. Probably a combination of the stomach starting to protest and common sense telling them that something is wrong.

Now, such an experiment will not have much practical value for most people, but you can also use such knowledge differently. The key point here is that you will eat less if you think you have more food in front of you. If you think there’s a lot of food in front of you, you’ll also perceive the amount you’re consuming as higher and be less inclined to eat more.

Victor gives some examples of this before the experiment. These handy tips deserved more of our attention.

And a fact check, of course.

Victor’s Tip #1: “Small Plate Makes You Eat”

The first example Mids gives is the importance of the size of the plate on which you serve your food. In a small experiment, he shows that we often perceive the amount of food on a plate as smaller when the plate is larger. Because the food takes up a relatively small surface area of the plate, we perceive the amount as lower. Conversely, the same amount of food on a small plate seems like more. By eating from a small plate, you would eat less because you think you’re getting relatively more.

Some studies have indeed shown that the amount of food eaten increases as the plate size increases [2]. An experimental study from 2012 shows that people do indeed perceive the amount of food as smaller when the plate is larger [3]. It sounded familiar to me. It’s a study by Brian Wansink, about which I happened to write recently because some of his studies have been retracted. From the same study by Wansink, it also emerged that people tend to serve more on larger plates.

This is partly due to a principle known as the Delboeuf illusion [1]. A circle appears larger when surrounded by a circle that has only a slightly larger diameter. A meal on a plate can be seen as a circle within a circle (unless you have a square plate, of course, but the same principle applies). The same circle appears smaller when surrounded by a circle with a much larger diameter. However, a study from 2007 found that reducing the size of the plate does not lead to people eating less [4].

Victor’s Tip #2: High Contrast Between Food and Plate Makes You Eat Less

Victor’s third tip I mention here as the second because it also has to do with the Delboeuf illusion. Namely, that a high contrast between the color of the food and the color of the plate makes the amount seem larger. So, if you’re eating pasta, for example, you should use a dark-colored plate to feel like you’re getting more.

This effect has indeed been demonstrated in several studies since the sixties. Causing contrast between both circles makes the inner circle appear larger [5,6,7]. So, your brain sees this as a larger amount of food, making you feel more satiated mentally. A study from 2014 found that plates with a colored rim caused people to overestimate the amount of food on them [8].

Victor’s Tip #2b: Eat Less with a Red Plate

According to Victor, a red plate would have a reducing effect on the food you eat, independent of the contrast. I found this, among other things, in a study from 2013 in which popcorn and chocolate chips were presented on both white and red plates [9]. The red plate resulted in less food being eaten in both cases, while the contrast between chocolate chips and a white plate is greater.

So, instead of buying plates in all colors of the rainbow and matching them to the color of your food at every meal, it may be more effective to use only red plates if you want to eat less. At the very least, it’s easier.

Victor’s Tip #3: Eat with the Non-Dominant Hand

According to Victor, eating with the non-dominant hand, for most people the left hand, would make you eat 20% less.

Indeed, there is a study showing that you eat less with the non-dominant hand. How much less depends on the context. The study from 2010 shows that this mainly has to do with the extent to which you are aware of what and how much you eat [10]. Especially when you eat out of habit, eating with the non-dominant hand makes you eat less automatically. Like that bag of chips next to you on the couch during a movie, for example.

In the study, it was a bowl of popcorn eaten during a movie visit. The researchers mainly wanted to show to what extent habit determines how much you eat. They investigated this by looking at what happens when you disrupt automatic behavior by letting moviegoers eat with the non-dominant hand.

People who often ate popcorn and therefore had the biggest habit didn’t care whether the popcorn was fresh or old when eaten with the dominant hand. People who normally ate little popcorn (and therefore had a low habit) were critical of quality when eating with the dominant hand. They were more aware of the quality and ate considerably less. When eating with the non-dominant hand, even people with a ‘great popcorn habit’ became more aware of the quality and also ate less.

You can wonder whether you can translate this data into a general effect of ‘20% less eating’ under other circumstances. However, if you have your regular indulgence next to you (in my case, sweet Harlekijntjes), it might be useful to put it on the other side for once.

Mindf#cking Facts

So, there seems to be enough basis for the tips that Victor Mids gives, although sometimes packaged in a perhaps slightly too simple conclusion.

As with any weight loss tip, success depends on how much you can put them into practice. We’ve already received reactions about the tip to eat slower to eat less, saying that this is very annoying in practice. You might feel the same way about eating with the non-dominant hand. However, using small red plates doesn’t seem so difficult. Perhaps it doesn’t match your interior color-wise (now that the holidays are over) and you find small plates inconvenient. But it couldn’t be much easier than that.

References

1. Delboeuf FJ. Note Sur Certaines Illusions d’Optique: Essai d’une Théorie Psychophysique de la Manière don’t l’Oeil Apprécie les Distances et les Angles [Note on Certain Optical illusions: Essay on a Phychophysical Theory Concerning the Way in Which the Eye Evaluates Distances and Angles] Bulletins de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, Lettres et Beaux-arts de Belgique. 1865;19:195–216.
2. The contribution of expanding portion sizes to the US obesity epidemic. Young LR, Nestle M Am J Public Health. 2002 Feb; 92(2):246-9.
3. Van Ittersum K, Wansink B. Plate size and color suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s bias on serving and eating behavior. Journal of Consumer Research. 2012;39:215–28.
4. Using a smaller plate did not reduce energy intake at meals. Rolls BJ, Roe LS, Halverson KH, Meengs JS Appetite. 2007 Nov; 49(3):652-60.
5. Weintraub DJ, Cooper LA. Coming of age with the Delboeuf illusion: Brightness contrast, cognition, and perceptual development. Developmental Psychology. 1972;6:187–97
6. The effect of hue and brightness on the size-illusion of concentric circles. OYAMA T Am J Psychol. 1962 Mar; 75():45-55.
7. Delboeuf illusions: contour or size detector interactions? Jaeger T, Lorden R. Percept Mot Skills. 1980 Apr; 50(2):376-8.
8. McClain A, van den Bos W, Matheson D, Desai M, McClure SM, Robinson TN. Visual illusions and plate design: The effects of plate rim widths and rim coloring on perceived food portion size. International journal of obesity (2005). 2014;38(5):657-662. doi:10.1038/ijo.2013.169.
9. Bruno N, Martani M, Corsini C, Oleari C. The effect of the color red on consuming food does not depend on achromatic (Michelson) contrast and extends to
   rubbing cream on the skin. Appetite. 2013 Dec;71:307-13. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2013.08.012. Epub 2013 Aug 31. PubMed PMID: 23999521.
10. Neal DT, Wood W, Wu M, Kurlander D. The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives? Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2011
    Nov;37(11):1428-37. doi: 10.1177/0146167211419863. Epub 2011 Aug 22. PubMed PMID: 21859902.