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    Brian Wansink, PhD, PREVENTION

    Brian Wansink, PhD, PREVENTION

  • The "healthy" breakfast that can make you gain weight

    Have you ever heard that eating oatmeal helps you lose weight? It seems to make good sense: It's high in fiber, hot and satisfying, and can keep you from binging later that morning on a box of donuts. Print a high-fiber shopping list.

  • Use this instead of a fork -- and lose weight!

    Eating with chopsticks can be a hassle. People eat slower and eat less per bite. This is why dieters are often told to eat with chopsticks. (See more ways to stick to your diet here.) So who do you suppose is more likely to use a fork when eating in a Chinese restaurant - a normal weight person or a

  • How to resist your #1 diet weakness

    What's the hardest part about weight loss? Visual temptations. I just had a friend over last night who has a show on the Food Network. The conversation turned to willpower-shattering temptations, and one person said their only dietary weakness was seeing chocolate on their kitchen counter.

  • Quiz: What's your cooking personality?

    A few years back, I did a study of 1004 cooks to see if certain types of personalities are likely to be better cooks than others. What we found was that most cooks fall into one of five different Cooking Personality Profiles. The profile of these Nutritional Gatekeepers not only influences how they

  • What would YOU do for a Klondike bar?

    There is a limit to how much work we will go through for something we love as much as candy and ice cream - and it is not very much. One cafeteria tested this by leaving the lid of an ice cream cooler closed on some days and open on other days.The ice cream cooler was in the exact same location, and

  • Is your home-cooking as unhealthy as fast food?

    Lots of people like to point at the increasing portion-size trend in restaurants and fast food as being the source of their extra pounds.But is this any different than what we've done at home? I thought it would be interesting to see how the calorie levels and serving sizes of our home-cooked recipe

  • What's the most popular day of the week to start a diet?

    What day of the week did you start your most recent diet? Chances are it was a Monday.

  • No-gain gourmet dining -- with the Nicaraguan Ambassador!

    I recently had the very cool experience of meeting the Nicaraguan Ambassador at his Embassy in Washington D.C. for a private dinner.

  • "I'm not hungry, but I'm going to eat this anyway"

    The acid test for mindless eating is wolfing down food when we know we are not hungry. How many times have we done this? Most of us could start counting as recently as today. (See a list of mind tricks to stay on track here.)Over coffee, a new friend commented that he had lost 30 pounds within the p

  • Join the Small Plate Movement

    We've done dozens of studies that show that people can eat 20-25% more than they usually do and not feel any more full than normal. Fortunately, they can also mindlessly eat 20-25% less and not feel any hungrier. What's interesting is that if you use a 10-inch dinner plate instead of the 12-inch pl

  • The Morning-Banana Diet scandal

    Have you heard about the Morning-Banana Diet?About 6 months ago a Japanese PhD student's wife was telling me about this, and now it has hit the states.

  • Top 10 tips on running a marathon

    A number of people have recently written me asking for nutrition advice for running a marathon. I've not done research on this, but I do have a few personal pointers. Most are as relevant for a marathon as they are for a 5K, or the first day of a pilates class, or the first day of your new fitness p

  • Don’t let BMI baffle you: Here’s how to calculate your own

    The other day a person asked me how she could tell if she was overweight or "pleasingly plump."

  • What weight-gaining benchmarks do you use?

    Most of us do not wake up after six months and discover that we are 25 pounds heavier. Why? If we gain 10 pounds, that really nice pair of dress slacks only zips half-way up. If we gain 20 pounds, our belt runs out of notches and we have to use rope. (Click here to see a slideshow of real women who

  • Top 8 signs of lasting weight loss

    Other than staring at the bathroom scale, what are the most common signals people use to know they are at the right weight? Here's what 322 people told us in a recent survey:

  • Quick trick to lose 25 pounds

    Just 10 extra calories a day - 1 stick of Doublemint gum or 3 small Jelly Belly jelly beans - will make you a pound more portly one year from today. Only three Jelly Bellies a day. This is the danger of creeping calories.

  • The REAL reason French women don't get fat

    Maybe one answer to the French Paradox - why French women don't get fat - is because they know when to stop eating. Perhaps they pay more attention to internal cues such as whether they feel full, and they pay less attention to the external cues that can lead them to overeat (like the level of soup

  • The hefty truth about high school reunions

    Summer means graduations for some, and it means high school reunions for others.

  • Craving a brownie? Eat (a small) one.

    One of the biggest reasons why most diets will fail before they even really begin is that they lead most people to believe that they have to deprive themselves of the foods they like and the lifestyle they enjoy. They also require that a person forego their typical way of life and spend it focused o

  • Keep eating. Just walk more.

    A great program that's been initiated and championed by Dr. James O. Hill at the University of Colorado has looked at what is called the America on the Move program. The idea is the basic one that involves moving 10,000 steps a day. Here's the trade-off. If you want to lose 10 lbs in a year, you'll