02 Jan 5 Environmental Factors That Affect Your Eating?

Environmental factors can contribute to how we eat and how much we eat.  Be aware of these subconscious effects and intentionally counter them.

1. Bright lights along with fast, loud, and irritating music encourage us subconsciously to eat too quickly.  We eat so quickly that the satiety mechanism of the brain has no time to respond.  It takes about 20 minutes for our brain to register that we are satisfied.  The end result is that we eat too much.  The opposite is not so helpful either.  A candlelight dinner with slow, soothing music promotes eating longer, so long that we have time to eye the deserts and other delicacies that we might otherwise ignore.  Studies suggest that while food consumption with slow meals may increase, drink consumption increases even more.  Don’t forget that many drinks are loaded with empty calories.  As Goldilocks found, the sweet spot is in the middle – not too long and not too short.
2. Hot weather promotes more drinking and less eating.  We also tend to be more active during the warmer months.  Cold weather results in people eating more and slowing down.  Campbell soup understands this and in the 1990’s had radio stations specifically run their soup adds on inclement weather days.  From an evolutionary standpoint, we are wired to eat more in the Fall with anticipation that food is about to become scarce in the upcoming Winter.
3. What and how much we eat often depends on the people with which we are eating.  We tend to eat the average amount of our surrounding group.  This is one of the reasons it is so difficult for a member of an obese family to lose weight.  If you typically eat only little when you eat alone, then eating with a group may be detrimental.  If you eat heavily alone, however, you will likely eat less with a group.  The types of food we eat can also be influenced by the group.  If you eat with a teenagers at a Pizza Parlor, you are more likely to eat larger portions of high-fat, high-carb foods.  If you meet with your weight loss group at your local whole food restaurant, healthier choices are more likely to be made.
4. While we do eat to the average, in general the more people we are around the more we eat.  Studies have shown that when we eat with one more person our consumption increases by 35%.  When we eat with 4 people our consumption increases by 75%, and with a group of 7 or more our consumption increases by 96%.
5. Overweight people are more likely to eat by the clock.  One study redesigned all the clocks in the lab to run an hour faster than a normal clock.   Even though the time was actually 11 am, the clocks read noon.  Obese participants in the study tended to eat when the clocks read noon not realizing the actual time was one hour earlier.  Their normal weight counterparts were more likely to wait to eat.  Listen to your internal hunger thermostat instead of arbitrarily eating at a set time.

Here’s to the Journey!

(David W. Ball, MD, an Internal Medicine physician, founder of NuVitality Health – a wellness education company, and co-founder of Life Changing Fitness – a fitness facility for Every Body)