Is a Messy Kitchen Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals?
Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,
I’m a big fan of minimalism, an ancient philosophy that suggests that owning fewer things and generally leading a simpler, more orderly life can powerfully boost life satisfaction.
From Jesus (who advised his disciples to “to take nothing for your journey except a staff”) to Thoreau extolling his tidy, miniscule Walden cabin to Joshua Becker’s excellent website Becoming Minimalist, it’s a radical idea that the materialist mainstream can never quite kill as each new generation of the overwhelmed and world-weary rediscovers its virtues.
Now, as it turns out, this philosophy may dramatically improve physical health as well. Recently, a study suggested that minimalism — or at least a bit of Spartan, orderly discipline — in the home kitchen can be a powerful ally in the age-old quest to lose weight.1
To see how a cluttered, chaotic kitchen impacts food consumption, Brian Wansink — director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab — and his team began with a group of about 100 female college students.
The researchers sent roughly half of them to a clean, well-organized kitchen. The rest went to a cluttered, chaotic kitchen with papers, dishes, and random cooking utensils strewn all around.
After completing a writing assignment in which they were asked to recall a moment from their lives when they felt in or out of control, the women who wrote about being out of control were asked to take part in a “taste test” of crackers, cookies, and baby carrots. No suggestions were made as to the proper amount to eat.
Result? Women in the crowded, chaotic space who had just finished writing about their high-stress moment ate 103 calories worth of cookies.
And over in the clean, orderly, rather spare kitchen? Women who had just recalled their most stressful moment ate only 61 cookie calories.
Interestingly, the difference in the kitchens’ clutter quotient had no significant effect on the quantity of carrots or crackers eaten — just the cookies.
It’s Not You… It’s Your Surroundings
This dramatic impact of environment on food consumption aligns with other studies Wansink has conducted over the last 25 years. In his books, including Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think and Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, he suggests improving our diets by:
- Making the healthier foods more visible. Arrange all food storage areas — refrigerator, pantry, and cupboards — to put nutrient-dense, low-calorie foods front and center. Best move: Transfer fruits and vegetables from the out-of-sight, out-of-mind “crisper” drawers to the fridge’s top shelf. This swap has been shown to triple produce consumption
- Conversely, making nutrient-poor, high-calorie foods invisible. Wansink’s research indicates that women who had visible breakfast cereal in their kitchens weighed, on average, 21 pounds more than those women who had no cereal in view
- Thinking small. Serving food and drink in smaller bowls, spoons, and glasses dramatically drops the amount consumed.
Bottom line: Too many people spend too much time berating themselves for lacking discipline when it comes to eating for good health and ideal weight. Anyone who has studied habitual behaviors will tell you that the secret to breaking any bad habit is not an iron will. It’s removing the stimulus — defined as “an agent, action, or condition that elicits or accelerates a physiological or psychological activity or response.”
Chaotic spaces yield chaotic overconsumption. Spare, orderly, disciplined spaces elicit spare, orderly, disciplined eating.
So if weight gain is an issue for you, take this study and others like it seriously. Food consumption is far more context-driven than you might imagine — so if your context is working against your best interests, change it.
Or as Wansink put it, “It’s easier to become slim by design than slim by willpower.”
Sincerely,
Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions
Citations
- Lenny R. Vartanian, Kristin M. Kernan and Brian Wansink. Clutter, Chaos, and Overconsumption: The Role of Mind-Set in Stressful and Chaotic Food Environments. Environment and Behavior. 2016
