Posting Calories On Menus Makes People Eat More

Since 2008, fast food restaurants in New York have been required to post calorie counts next to items on their menus in an effort to get consumers to take more care over what they're eating. Great idea, and one I'm generally in favour of. Being more transparent about what people are shoving into their mouths, especially at fast food restaurants, should, logically, encourage people to consume less calories.

But, according to two research papers by NYU and Yale, consumers actually ended up consuming more calories after the changes were made. So much for transparency. I can think of a number of reasons why this might fail, but two spring to mind:

1. If you're ordering a super-sized anything at a fast food restaurant, worring about calories probably ain't at the top of your list of things you're worrying about.

2. I'm sure your brain is probably going - "wow, if I order the slightly larger one, my cost per calorie just fell. Score!".

Being Overweight Makes Your Brain Smaller

In a report on the US News website titled "As Waistlines Widen, Brain Shrinks" they write:

For every excess pound piled on the body, the brain gets a little bit smaller.

That's the message from new research that found that elderly individuals who were obese or overweight had significantly less brain tissue than individuals of normal weight.

"The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older," said UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson, senior author of a study published online in Human Brain Mapping.

Unfortunately the article doesn't state if a) reversing brain shrinkage is possible by losing weight or b) if underweight people develop super-massive brains. (Actually - size zero models put that theory to rest).

So, if you were looking for just one more motivator to get out and do something physical - keeping your grey matter in tact is a pretty good one.

> Read the full article here

How Do You Spend Your Day?

The New York times has created a very slick interactive chart showing how Americans over the age of 15 spend their day.

It's quite interesting to see how the different demographics spend their time and although there's plenty in here which is obvious, there are a few things I thought were interesting:

Among the employed workforce who reported their day in this survey - the average time spent working was 5 hours, 12 minutes (if only my day was that short).

But it would also seem that people with advanced educations also work smarter, not harder, by a full 2 minutes:

When it came to sports or physical activity, the numbers got a little misleading. According the chart - men played sports or watched sports for an average of 27 minutes per day. Erm...last time I checked - watching sports was not the same as doing it. Who would have thought a simple misunderstanding was the reason for soaring obesity rates?

There's plenty more in there - so have a snoop around and see how you compare.

How do you spend your day?

How To Kick A Bad Habit

It seems that kicking some of our naughty habits might be as simple as planing our responses before the habit is triggered. According to an article in Psychology Today:

Students at Utrecht University in the Netherlands confessed to indulging at home or at school, alone or with friends—all potential "situational" cues to eat. But they also blamed a whole separate class of cues: "motivational" drivers such as seeking enjoyment, avoiding boredom, and wanting to be sociable.

To test which were the true triggers of the munchies, the researchers formed two groups of students. People who specifically planned what to do when confronted by a motivational cue—e.g., "If I'm bored and I feel like a snack, I'll eat an apple"—ate more fruits and vegetables and 90 fewer calories of junk food over the following week. But those who plotted counterattacks on situational triggers ate just the same as ever.

The hard part is figuring out what motivates you to engage in that behaviour in the first place. The article suggests keeping some sort of diary to track this - but I'm not the diary keeping type and the discipline to do this amongst everything else that we have deal with on a daily basis makes this too complex for my liking.

So here are some simple tips for helping replace the bad habits with better ones.

• Start slow. Don't try and change your whole life in one go. - it rarely works. If you're trying to quit smoking and lose weight and get fit and drink less caffeine; taking them all on in one go is likely to end badly. Pick something, nail it and then move on to the next thing.
• Replace the temptation. Giving things up is hard and we're wired to be loss averse, so in some cases you might be able to replace rather then drop a habit . Restocking your junk food cupboard, for example, with healthier alternatives means you'll be better off then next time you find yourself wanting to eat in front of the TV rather than giving up eating in front of the TV.
• Plan ahead. Planning makes a difference. If you always hit the supermarket on your way home when you're hungry, you're more likely to make poor choices. Planning your weekly shop, your weekly gym sessions, your nights out in advance, will help you stay on track (and can usually save you money too).
• Write it down and show it around. In an article "What is the active ingredient in lasting commitments?" the authors detail studies that show people who write down goals are more likely to succeed in acheiving them. By showing them to friends and family, you create a social commitment to achieving those goals which increases your chances again of meeting your objectives. If you're seriosuly committed to change - then this would be the way to go.

What are your best tips for beating bad habits and what ones did you succesfully conquer?