Your Kitchen

The quality of the food in your kitchen has an enormous impact. Most people already know what is good and what is junk. As a rule of thumb, your kitchen should be stocked with plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Your dishes matter too. In a Cornell experiment on cereal bowl size, participants given larger bowls served and ate 16% more — while believing they had eaten less. The "big bowl" people needed more food to feel satisfied, and the only difference was the bowl. The same effect showed up with plates and serving spoons.

This is an optical illusion you can put to work. Six ounces of pasta fills an 8-inch plate and looks like dinner; on a 12-inch plate it looks like a stamp on a letter. Use 9 or 10-inch plates rather than 12 or 15. Colour matters as well: if the plate matches the food, people serve and eat about 18% more.

Container size follows the same rule — the bigger the package you serve from, the more you eat, usually by 20 to 30%. If you buy in bulk, repackage into smaller bags, deli containers, or mason jars.

Appliances tell a story too. It is not the appliance, it is how you use it. A blender is associated with healthier eating because people make smoothies with it — an effect that does not extend to those who only make daiquiris. And when a kitchen is empty, you are eating out or ordering in, which means it is devoid of good food as well as bad.

In Wansink’s kitchen study, people with cereal visible weighed 21 pounds more than neighbors who did not use cereal boxes as decor. Visible chips cost 8 pounds, cookies 9 pounds, regular soda 29 pounds, diet soda 24 pounds. The good news: people who kept a variety of fruit visible weighed 7 pounds less.

What do you see when you open the refrigerator? The first thing should be healthy food — fruits and vegetables in clear containers. Mason jar salads are ideal for this. If the first thing you see is a take-out box of leftover fried chicken, you have a problem.

The simplest fix is not to put the dangerous food in there. Failing that, make sure it is not the first thing you see: push it to the back, put it in a drawer, use opaque containers. This does not quite work for ice cream, since you can still read the label — so wrap it in foil and bury it deep.

In Slim by Design, Wansink found that families with a microwave in the kitchen were most likely to eat microwave food. Some kitchens are arranged more around the microwave than the stove, which makes cooking real food less convenient than reheating. For some people the answer is moving the microwave out of the way. If you do not pop it in the microwave, you will not pop it in your mouth.

Keep all indulgences as inconvenient as possible. With ice cream, the recommendation is not to keep it in your freezer at all — eat it at an ice cream shop, or better yet, only when you make it yourself.

Then flip the coin. Cut and washed vegetables on the middle shelf in a clear container are genuinely convenient. Keep lean protein like tofu, pre-cooked grains, beans, hard-boiled eggs, and Greek yogurt visible and handy. In the freezer, put frozen fruit and vegetables front and center. Keep a bowl with at least two kinds of fruit within two feet of a high-traffic area.

And owning a steamer or blender is not enough if it lives under the basement stairs. Put the appliances that help you cook well on the counter, where the cereal and cookies used to be.

For many people the kitchen is more of a living area than a food preparation space. Soft lighting, comfortable chairs, a television — all of it keeps you hanging around near the food far too long, which means mindless eating.

It is also a problem because a room comfortable enough to lounge in is usually not functional enough to cook in properly. A working kitchen is neat, organized, well lit, and free of clutter, with easy access to the tools. Doc Russ hangs a pot rack from the ceiling so the right pot is visible and reachable instead of buried in a knee-high cabinet. Make your kitchen less comfy.

Smells drive behavior too. If your kitchen always smells like cookies, you will crave cookies. Let non-food smells dominate — flowers, or a neutral candle.

The opposite failure is just as costly: if the kitchen is always a disaster, you will avoid cooking to avoid the mess. If you can keep only one room in the house genuinely clean, make it the kitchen.