Beyond Home · Space 6 of 7 · 38 min
Your Car
Nobody has ever starved to death while driving. The same cannot be said of getting fat.
Our dependence on cars has not only made us move less — it has handed us one more place to eat without noticing, and the food we eat there tends to be the worst kind for us.
Question 1 · What’s here?
Whatever is in the car gets eaten
Bottom line: if you keep food and calorie-heavy drinks like soda and juice in your car, you will eat and drink them. That can work in your favor if what you keep in the car is an apple and a bottle of water.
If you absolutely must eat in the car, use the snack bag strategy — a set portion, decided in advance, rather than an open bag with no bottom.
Question 2 · What’s seen?
What you see through the windshield counts too
In the car, what you see includes what is outside it. When you see the sign for the drive-through, you are likely to drive through.
One answer is to plan your routes away from those places. Another is to look for different things: scout the safe places to buy food along your regular drives — grocery stores, farm stands, produce markets.
Question 3 · What’s convenient?
Junk food is engineered to be convenient
Drive-throughs and convenience stores work against you by making it far too easy to grab and go. The habit worth building is getting your food from the produce section of a grocery store instead.
Wansink tells the story of a man with a serious slushie habit — every day, on the way home, a calorie-packed slushie. Nothing worked until he made a seemingly silly rule: sit in the parking lot for five full minutes before going in. No deprivation at all, just a wait. What killed the habit was realizing that getting home to his family mattered more than the slushie.
Question 4 · How does it feel?
The most emotionally complicated room you own
The car may be the most complicated environment of all, because you can run through a whole range of emotions in a single ride. Boredom, anger, frustration, excitement, happiness, and sadness can all happen on one drive to work.
Every one of those feelings can lead you to eat when you are not hungry. Knowing which ones show up on your commute is the first step to planning for them.