James' World 2

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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 two of his colleagues used data from wireless scales to record the daily weight of 2,924 people over the course of one year. They found an average weight gain of 0.6 kg in the days after Christmas in the United States and 0.8 kg in Germany. Six months later, half of this weight gain had still not been lost.

It is not also because we actually happy to keep this extra weight. Interest in dieting, as shown in Google searches, skyrockets as soon as the season of indulgences turns into the season of good resolutions. But this interest diminishes as the year progresses, and 80% of diets fail, only to spike again with renewed eagerness on the next year, in an endless cycle of hopefulness and forgetfulness.

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 neglect to pay attention to how we actually feel when we are eating.

Happiness is a small portion of food

Over the past 10 years, I have studied how people choose how much indulgent food to eat; in other words, when eyeing a chocolate cake, when do they take a big slice, a small one, or none? Over and over again, I’ve found that people overwhelmingly focus on a) the fear of being hungry and b) value for money, which both lead to choosing large portions. Another important factor, which I discussed in an earlier HBR article, is that our brain is very bad at product sizing and significantly underestimates the size of today’s jumbo food portions. If we’re worried about feeling cheated by (and ravenous after eating) an overpriced, tiny bag of popcorn at the movies, we’re also incapable of guessing just how much bigger the jumbo size is.

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Big size

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