Eating Mindfully: How to Keep Your Kids from Getting Fat

Jul 17, 2009 by Anna Migeon

The human appetite, like the human conscience, quits working if you ignore it long enough.

According to Brian Wansink in his 2006 book, Mindless Eating, modern humans have learned to tune out the appetite and the body’s cues about what and how much we need to eat. Instead we are relying on external stimuli to regulate our intake.

We don’t stop when we get enough; we don’t stop until the container is empty, Wansink’s experiments reveal. If the container’s bigger we’ll eat more. If given bigger packages of ingredients, we’ll cook and eat it all. If the soup bowl is being secretly refilled from the bottom, we’ll just keep eating and eating because it never disappears. Like goldfish, we tend to eat whatever…