...is a clever marketing ploy by food manufacturers

Further evidence that a lot of dieting is psychological comes from a report produced by the Journal of Consumer Research which shows that calorie counting dieters are more likely to eat a larger amount of calories when faced with small snacks. Ukmedix News has also seen other reports that show that dieters who are given low fat snacks tend to eat more calories than when they are given normal fat snacks of the same product.

The researchers examined the attitude to mini M&M packets and mini Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies and saw that many dieters were tempted to pick up these snacks because they were small and therefore they felt that they weren’t really cheating on their weight loss plans. They noted that people who were very conscious of calorie counting tended to go for these snacks and many of them perceived these mini snacks as “diet food”.

The researchers divided the volunteers into two different groups, one were the dieting group and the other group were those who were less concerned about what they ate and were not calorie counting.  They saw that when the dieters were faced with mini packs of various foodstuffs and also the larger packages they never even considered opening the latter but quickly ate the smaller sized versions.

The marketing of these mini packs of various high calorie snacks is a clever marketing ploy by food manufacturers. They realise that people on diets can’t buy large bags of chips or other fatty foods so they tempt them into buying them by putting them in these mini packs. Psychologically dieters feel that they are not really eating a lot of calories when in fact they are often eating more than they would if they were asked to help themselves to a little bit of the larger packets.

There is this perception that the mini packs are in fact “diet packs”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Dieters are known for wanting to believe information that allows them to eat what they want and that is why they are so susceptible to clever marketing and bad diet advice. You need to be ruthlessly honest with yourself and your eating habits and be extremely wary of mini snacks as they are a diet mine field which could completely blow you off course.

The best snacks are apples and oranges. Always buy the best quality fruit so that it tastes good and you look forward to eating it.