Why we eat too much food

About 2,300 holiday seasons ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote a letter to his friend Menoeceus in which he noted, “A wise person does not simply choose the largest amount of food but the most pleasing food.”

As we find ourselves in another season of joyous excesses, we may wonder why we don’t heed this advice.

It’s certainly not because we’re already disciplined eaters. My longtime co-author Brian Wansink and his colleagues found an average weight gain of 0.6 kilograms in the days after Christmas in the United States and 0.8 kilograms in Germany. Six months later, half this weight had still not been lost.

It is also not because we are happy to keep this extra weight. Interest in dieting skyrockets as soon as the season of indulgences turns into the season of resolutions. But this interest diminishes as the year progresses, and 80% of diets fail.

Why then do we go for the largest amount of food rather than the most pleasing? As is often the case, it is because we eat with our eyes, hearts and cultural norms, and we neglect to pay attention to how we actually feel when we are eating.

Over the past 10 years, I have studied how people choose how much indulgent food to eat. I’ve found that people overwhelmingly focus on the fear of being hungry and value for money, which both lead to choosing large portions.

We have also found that people get the relation between pleasure and portion size completely wrong.

Why is eating pleasure not related to portion size? It turns out that the first bite of anything is the most pleasurable. Every additional bite, while still enjoyable, provides less pleasure than the preceding one. This is a universal phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation. What is less well known is that it is the last bite that determines our overall satisfaction with the food that we have eaten. That means with large portions, the last bite is pretty bland and diminishes the overall pleasure of our eating experience.

How can we nudge ourselves to focus on pleasure, not size, when choosing how much to eat this holiday season?

For some people, the pleasure of eating comes from the aesthetic appreciation of the food. For others, it comes from the relief of eating impulses and hunger. We call the first type “epicurean eating pleasure” and the second “visceral eating pleasure.” Unlike epicurean pleasure, visceral pleasure is short lived and can be measured by the responsiveness to external food cues such as the sight and smell of food. Epicurean eaters, who prefer smaller food portions, report a higher well-being than visceral eaters.

So, whether or not you are already an epicurean eater, remember this holiday season that pleasure in food comes from appreciating its quality, not its quantity. After all, ‘tis the season to be jolly, not bloaty.