Book Review – Mindless Eating

Mindless Eating; Why We Eat More Than We Think

By  Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Reviewed by Monica Walmsley

Mindless Eating is about lifestyle; it’s not a temporary, quick-fix diet book, it’s not about how to lose ten pounds in ten days, it’s not about losing weight for a special event only to pile it on again afterwards. It’s about changing your lifestyle, the way you view food and your eating habits to make eating more enjoyable for you.

In the introduction Dr Brian Wansink specifically says, “To those of us who love food, a diet is pretty much ‘die’ with a ‘t’ on the end…This book is not about dietary extremism…it’s about reengineering your environment so that you can eat what you want without guilt and without gaining weight…The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.”

In Mindless Eating Dr Wansink talks about how different visual clues affect our eating, such as packaging, labels, and portion-size. He looks into questions like why we crave salt, fat and sugar, when and why we eat comfort foods and why our personal comfort foods are comforting to us. He explains a variety of experiments used to test different theories. He illustrates unhealthy eating habits and gives ideas and suggestions on how to change them for healthy ones. He goes in-depth to bring out the truth behind the typical mindless eating mentality.

Throughout the book Dr Wansink gives suggestions on how to change your negative mindless eating habits into positive mindless eating habits. He provides simple, unintimidating ways to make it easier to eat less without noticing. He gives examples of real people who have lost weight without noticing by using the mindless eating method.

This is a great book for teens as well as adults because when you know why you do what you do, you can make the changes you wish to make.  It’s a book that will leave you feeling hopeful and not at all like you should start denying yourself of your favourite foods. It takes the ‘die’ out of ‘diet’ and goes back to its original Latin root, meaning ‘way of life’. It provides the option of a hopeful, none depriving diet, because the best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.

Recommended 16+