Are You Sitting or Standing in the Wrong Place?

The next time you're at a party, go to the table furthest from the buffet and face away.

In Mindless Eating, Wansink suggests to leave food in the kitchen, not the table, so you have to get up for seconds or thirds—it's not an arms reach away staring at you—and that has been a huge help in our house over the years, especially at holiday feasts. (Anytime I cheat on this practice and put food on the table I always find myself feeling like an overstuffed balloon on the couch after dinner, lamenting “I ate too much!”) I also can't stand by the food table at parties!

The dining room on the cruise had the majority of tables five feet from the buffet. Overflow tables were in another room, but it was a walk. Almost no tables faced away from the buffet, the exception being two tables behind a wall/door where the servers went in and out of.

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The food court was always jammin' so we hardly had a pick of our seats. We sat where we could and it didn't take long for me to realize if we sat anywhere but the overflow room, I was getting up two and three times, and so was my husband. Sure we were getting more fruit or vegetables, but we were both eating way beyond the volume we did at home. (My husband had not read Slim by Design, so he was a great subject to watch.)

Even more interestingly, despite all knowing this..trickery, I was still falling in the trap! And when I tried to have willpower and not go back for more, I felt anguish and eventually grabbed a roll on my way back to the room. Willpower and intelligence was not enough.

Equally fascinating, during low volume times, when there were more open tables to choose from, I realized thinner people, and particularly Asian travelers, fanned out to the more distant tables, even when they didn't have to. It confirmed the hundreds of experiments and observations Wansink had conducted with his team across the U.S.

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