I’d really like to think that I am always mindful when I eat, and I gauge my fullness by how I feel and not by how much food I have left sitting on my plate, but I’m not sure that’s always the case.  A recent study found that people eat more with their eyes than they do with their stomachs, and use the amount of food remaining on their plate or in their bowl to determine if they’ve had enough to eat.

So how did they go about performing this study to determine that people used visual clues instead of clues given by their brains that signaled they were full? They used a specially rigged “bottomless” bowl of soup! This is how it worked:

Four people would sit at a table for 20 minutes, each eating from an 18-ounce bowl of tomato soup.  The catch was that two of the bowls would never get empty, thanks to tubing running from the bowls to a six-quart vat of soup hidden under the tables.

The results? Well, those who ate from the normal bowls of soup each ate about 9 ounces while those with the bottomless bowls ate about 15 ounces of soup. When asked to estimate how many calories were consumed, those with the normal bowl guessed 123 when in reality it was 155. Those with the bottomless bowls estimated that they ate about 127 calories when in reality they ate about 268 calories worth. Certainly this would be considered mindless eating.

Reading this study was a great reminder of how important it is to pay attention to the signals that our bodies give us that tell us when we’re full. It was also a great reminder for me that when I eat, I shouldn’t be doing anything else like watching TV, or talking on the phone, or whatever else I do to multitask when I eat. The next time you sit down for a meal, stop to think about how you determine when you’re full and if you use those important clues from your brain, or if you’re the type to just clean your plate and eat everything on it.

Source: Retuers