Mind Your Food: Automatic Eating
Trying to lose weight and not having any luck? You may be eating on automatic pilot. Read on and find out how to stop those invisible calories from sneaking into your diet.
By Judith J. Wurtman, Ph.D.
(Nutricise) — Have you ever found yourself eating without realizing it? Candies from your coworker's desk, a doughnut in the coffee room, a handful of peanuts from the dish in the living room end up in your mouth without any conscious decision to eat.
This is automatic eating. We are unaware that it is taking place and often vehemently deny that it did. People asked to keep food records have amnesia when it comes to writing down the nibbles and snacks that may be eaten frequently throughout the day. They are invisible. However, their effect on weight gain can be quite visible.
A middle manager in a family run company admitted that only after he joined our weight-loss center did he realize how much time he spent eating at work. 'Between the coffee rolls in the morning, and the Twinkies, trail mix, and buttered popcorn in the afternoon, I must have eaten at least 1,000 extra calories a day.'
Automatic eating is a hard habit to break. The easiest way to do this is to make the food hard to find. Have family members hide their snack foods and remove all open dishes of candy, nuts or chips. Ask your coworkers to put food as far from your desk as possible.
If snacks are still easily accessible, try this technique for aborting the automatic eating: Keep low-fat snacks in your desk, such as breadsticks, marshmallows, lollipops, whole-grain crackers, licorice or gummy bears. Make sure that every time you must pass an office snack, one of your snacks is in your hand. You won't reach for the office goody because you already have a snack in your hand. Eat it if you honestly feel that you need to eat something. Otherwise return the snack to your drawer and save it for your next trip past temptation.
