the body does not always tell you when you are full up

According to Dr. Brian Wansink from Cornell University the positive psychological impact of small changes in your environment with regard to dieting success is very significant and can make all the difference between success and failure in weight loss.

For example in one experiment it was observed the children who were given a 16-ounce bowl would consume two times as much cereal as those children who were given an 8-ounce bowl. It could be that a simple trick like this could help you to keep your children's weight in check much more so than loads of other complicated diets.

In another experiment 60 people were given a bowl of soup for lunch, but unbeknown to them, 30 of them had a special pipe inserted underneath the table which was slowly refilling their soup bowls. It was observed that on average the participants who had the refilling bowls consumed 73 percent more soup than those who had the regular bowls.

What these experiments basically show is that we place a big emphasis on the visual aspect of how much food we have eaten and that the body does not always tell you when you are full up.

Dr. Wansink said that a simple tip to lose weight would be to eat off smaller plates. He said that this advice could be much more effective than trying to rely on your willpower. Another diet tip he gave was keeping unhealthy food out of your house and making a point to eat slowly looking at your plate rather than quickly scoffing down your food while watching TV.

His research which was presented at the 119th Annual Conference of the American Psychological Association is interesting because it confirms what many people think which is that overeating is primarily a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.  Your hunger pangs could be controlled by simple psychological tricks rather than relying on a whole range of complicated diet foods.

Think about it! What simple changes in your lifestyle could have the biggest impact on how much you eat?