Dieting won’t stop your bad eating habits long-term – but changing your environment might

So many of us want to be thinner. How can we get there?

Our collective inability to lose weight suggests that we won’t find much evidence on strategies that work. We’ll find, instead, that study after study after study concludes that all diets are equally effective – which is to say, ineffective.

Not that we need peer review to tell us that. Just about every obesity expert points to a food environment loaded with convenient, calorie-dense, diabolically delicious food as the culprit (or at least one of the culprits). Yet a prescription for what to eat doesn’t really help when you come face-to-face with the temptation of what you’re not supposed to eat every time you turn around.

And guess what? There’s a body of research about that, too. People actually study whether humans eat more when there’s food around. And you’ll be shocked – shocked – to find out that they do. “The eating behaviour of those with higher relative weights is susceptible to the presence of palatable foods in the environment,” concludes one.

One of my favourite demonstrations of the power of simple proximity was done back in 2006, and it involved 40 office secretaries, each with a candy jar. When the jar was transparent, and within arm’s reach, the secretaries ate an average of just under eight candies a day. When the jar was opaque and six feet away, consumption dropped to about three. That’s a 60 per cent reduction, just by moving/changing the jar.