We think we’re pretty savvy.
We know that food advertisers and fast food chains are doing some fancy psychological stuff with colours and packaging and lighting to try to trick us into buying more food or ordering bigger portions.
But we’re onto them so we know that stuff isn’t working on us.
But we’re wrong.
We are, powerfully influenced by all kinds of external factors when it comes to our food choices, and the enormous packages filling our carts at Costco are a great example.
Those huge bags and boxes and tubs might be saving you money and trips to the store, but they’re also very likely expanding your waistline.
We all know that cutting calories and shedding pounds has a lot to do with controlling your portion size. The notion that, it’s not what you eat, it’s how MUCH of it you eat, is not new and was reinforced in the highly popular book, “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” which showed how Parisian women regularly indulge in heavy sauces and rich chocolate desserts while staying slim. Their secret? Tiny portions.
Great, so we don’t need to give up our favourite foods, we just need to eat smaller portions. No problem.
Well, it’s not that simple. And what does this all have to do with shopping at Costco?
Study after study has shown that we (all of us) are actually incredibly bad at judging portion size. We try to use references like a deck of cards or a tennis ball or closed fist to help us out, but it’s still something we have a lot of trouble wrapping our brains around. And, what’s worse, our already poor sense of portion size is incredibly influenced by external factors.
This is why those enormous, cost-saving packages you’re buying at Costco are making it even harder for you to stay on track towards your weight loss goals.
In his book, “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” food psychologist Brian Wansick describes dozens of studies that he and his team have completed at his lab at Cornell University where they gave participants in different groups, different sized packages of the same foods and compared how much they ate.
In every case, the people given the larger package ate more. Every case.
Even when people, after the fact were told that they hadn’t actually been asked in to collect their feedback on a new movie, but rather to study how many M & Ms they would eat during the show if given a large bag vs a small bag, almost all were 100% certain that the size of the bag had had no effect on how many M & Ms they’d eaten. But they were all wrong.
Everyone who was given the bigger bag had eaten more.
Every. Single. Person.
The data is clear – when we eat out of larger containers or off of larger plates, we perceive our portions to be smaller because they appear that way in comparison. One cup of popcorn looks quite substantial in a small box, but seems to be barely a mouthful at the bottom of an enormous tub. And since the portion seems smaller, we eat more.
This is not good if you’re working on losing weight or even maintaining a healthy weight.
So, here’s a tip, if you are going to buy the enormous packages from stores like Costco, do not eat directly from the package. Don’t even pour or scoop or pull directly from the package. When you get the big bag or box home, immediately break the contents up into smaller containers or Ziploc bags and store it that way. This will prevent your brain from being tricked into thinking it’s eating a smaller portion than it actually is.
