See-Food is food you didn’t know you wanted to eat until you saw it. I do not take responsibility for that dreadful pun, it’s Brian Wansink‘s. Got talk to him.
The concept is pretty useful though. I don’t generally think “Ooh, I’d like a chocolate” until I see the chocolates on my colleague’s desk. Or “Maybe I’d like a slice of battenburg,” until I open the cupboard with my man’s sweets and snacks.
In Wansink’s Book (that’s Mindless Eating) he describes an experiment with clear containers with chocolates versus opaque ones (where you can’t see the chocolates when the lid’s on). They put the chocolates on the desks of office workers, and watched which chocolates disappeared more quickly. Can you guess? Right.
There’s two things I do with the concept of see-food. First, I try to be wary of those “Oh, I could have a chocolate,” moments. Did I want the chocolate before I noticed the box? Am I hungry at all? Do I often have something sweet this time of day? No? Then it’s see food. Don’t eat it.
The second route takes more thinking in advance, but is effortless once you have it working. The idea is simple: put the food out of sight. For example, at my desk in work I now have one drawer with all my food and eating stuff, and I never need to open that drawer for any other reason. So I don’t stumble upon the crackers and instant soups and whatever, I don’t actually see them until snack-time.
The space in our kitchen is very limited (Americans: read, extremely limited), but if I really put my mind to it I could probably arrange things in such a way that The Dave’s Battenberg and crisps and sweets are in a container that I don’t need to go into. (Did I mention he doesn’t put on weight? How annoying is that!) And when I buy yummy snacky things for myself, I could take a little effort to hide them from myself.
Not to fool myself: I’ll know exactly where those chocky biscuits are when I get to craving them, but to not tempt my tired, distracted, poor little me when I get home from a stressful day at work, for instance.
I think this works especially well for mindless eaters like me, who overeat a little too often, and put on weight very slowly. I don’t think it’s as effective as a strategy for emotional eating, because, as mentioned, you will know exactly where the biscuits are when the road gets rocky, and if not, you will find them.
Different fixes for different types of problems. For see-food, I hide the food, even if that seems like kind of a crazy cat lady type of thing to do.
