Dan Ariely

Here are a few suggestions I gave for eating less on thanksgiving:
1) “Move to chopsticks!” Or, barring that, smaller plates and utensils.

2) Place the food “far away,” so people have to work (i.e., walk to the kitchen) to get another serving.

3) Start with a soup course, and serve other foods that are filling but low in calories.

4) Limit the number of courses.

Variety stimulates appetite. As evidence, consider a study conducted on mice. A male mouse and a female mouse will soon tire of mating with each other. But put new partners into the cage, and it turns out they weren’t tired at all. They were just bored. So, too, with food. “Imagine you only had one dish,” he says. “How much could you eat?”
5) Make the food yourself. That way you know what’s in it.

6) “Wear a very tight shirt.”

Enjoy

This advice also appeared here

February 19th was the one-year anniversary for the publication of Predictably Irrational.

To celebrate I called the chef at Rue Cler — Jason Bissey — and asked him to make an irrational dinner for us.

Here is what he came up with:
As soon as we sat at the table they gave us the check and thanked us for coming — asking us to come again soon.

Next, we each got a randomly chosen dessert accompanied by cappuccino & espresso served in wine glasses.

Jason stopped by a few minutes later, spilled some wood chips on the floor, handed me a broom & dustpan and asked me to sweep the floor (which I did, and I did a good job at it).

For the entrée: they asked who didn’t eat seafood and who didn’t eat pork and made sure to give the person who didn’t eat seafood the scallops and the person who didn’t eat pork the pork dish.

The appetizer was next.  It was delicious but a few seconds after I started eating Jason came out of the kitchen and as he walked by, he helped himself to a few of the shoestring onions from my plate and just keept on walking.

Soup and salad were next. We were given large serving spoons to eat the soup with and very, very small forks for the salad.  The server stopped by a few times to make sure that everything tasted horrible and that we were having a miserable time.

At the end, she asked who had the scallops and then said “Well you’ll be needing these” as she handed those who had the scallops an Imodium AD pill in a tiny plastic cup (an Antidiarrheal medicine).

Jason – Thanks a lot. I don’t think we will forget this meal for a long time.

Can it be that adding food makes people believe they are eating less?

A recent study by Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon report that this can indeed be the case (this version of the study was done with John Tierney of the NYT)

Half of the people were shown pictures of a meal consisting of an Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad and a 20-ounce cup of regular Pepsi and they were asked to estimate the amount of calories in the entire meal. The other participants were shown the same salad and drink plus two Fortt’s crackers prominently labeled “Trans Fat Free.” The crackers added 100 calories to the meal, but given that they were “diet” how will their presence influence the estimated amount of calories in the entire meal?

The first group estimated that the meal contained 1,011 calories, which was a little high. The meal actually contained 934 calories — 714 from the salad and 220 from the drink.  But, the second group  estimated the total amount of calories to go down.  Now the average estimate for the whole meal was only 835 calories — 199 calories less than the actual calorie count, and 176 calories less than the average estimate by the other group for the same meal without crackers.

The original study was interpreted as a halo effect of items labeled as diet.  I suspect that this is correct, but I think that it is also possible that people have a hard time computing totals and that instead they compute averages – which makes the estimation when the crackers are present to be lower.