A surprisingly simple way to stop overeating

See if this sounds familiar: You’re halfway through a “Mad Men” marathon when you realize that you’ve just polished off a bag of chips – and they didn’t even taste very good. In fact, they were probably stale. Many of us are guilty of this kind of mindless overeating from time to time, but why do we do it? And, perhaps more importantly, how can we stop? A  new study suggests that thwarting binge munching may be as easy as switching the hand you use to eat. Sure, you’re skeptical, but here’s how it works:

Researchers from the University of Southern California gave some people entering a movie theatre bags of stale popcorn and others bags that were freshly popped. They found that the moviegoers who said they usually eat popcorn while watching a film consumed the same amount of the stale stuff as they did the fresh corn. However, those who said that they don’t usually snack on popcorn at the movies ate more from the fresh bag, noting that the stale stuff just didn’t taste as good.

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“When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present,” says David Neal, lead author of the study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In other words If you’re used to eating chips while watching TV on your living-room sofa, you’ll keep eating them, regardless of how they taste.

But the researchers determined that making just a small change to habitual eating behavior can break the pattern. In a separate test, they asked a different group of movie-watching participants to use their non-dominant hands to eat from bags of both stale and fresh popcorn. The results showed that right-handed participants who used their left hands to eat (and vice versa for lefties) consumed less of the stale popcorn because they were paying more attention to what they were eating.

Do you think you could remember to switch hands while snacking in order to reduce your portion?

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