Sunday, May 18, 2008

Banning the "Pickable, Poppable, Dippable, Unstoppable"

Eating is fun. Eating is sometimes unconscious. Put those two facts together with large quantities of food and you’ve got a diet disaster in the making. You know what I’m talking about: those chips in laundry bag sizes, those chocolate samplers that layer on forever… It’s just too tempting. Even healthy foods like cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks and hummus dips can wreak havoc when eaten in large quantities. Many of my clients are champion “mindless eaters” and, when faced with a big bowl of, well, just about anything, they’ll keep going until they reach the bottom. The solution to this is obvious: don’t expose yourself to the Pickable, Poppable... See The Wall Street Diet, page 29 for some specific Pickable, Poppable solutions. But it’s helpful just to recognize that you can’t have vast quantities of food around. Rely on portion-controlled snacks. But small quantities of items like energy bars. Don’t keep a drawer full of healthy, tempting snacks at work. And when you put out the bowl of cherry tomatoes out for the kids, keep it out of your reach!

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