Eating in the Dark

Female: But also, I mean and this again, this is when we’re talking about size matters. These visual queues, they show you how tricky it can be just the smallness of things. You think it doesn’t have a lot of calories. Well, they also showed in studies that light is a visual cue. They had people who ate in the dark and when they didn’t have that visual queue, the hunger wasn’t told -- you know, they weren’t told that they were full. So you need to a lot of visual queues as well. So you should eat in a light. Don’t eat in the dark.

Male: So they were eating more in the dark.

Female: More in the dark because you need a visual queue because a lot of times, if you have a bigger things and you're going to tend to eat more than if you have a smaller portions.

Male: I think one of the reasons --

Male: So they can keep restaurants dark.

Male: I think one of the reasons is because as your stomach gets full, its start sending signal to your brain and saying, hey, stop eating but there's a big delay. There's like something of 20-minute delay until your brain gets the fullness signal. But if you can see it, you're like you know, your brain knows immediately how much your eating and you tend to eat less if you can see it.

Female: That also supports sitting down, having conversation while you eat, taking your time. Don’t eat in front of the TV. Don’t eat in front of the computer because you lose all those visuals fuse because your stomach is slower than your eyes.

Male: But I do think there's a great take away for the viewer at home which is number one, candlelight dinner is okay, but have some light when you eat. But the portion control is dictated much by the size of your plate. So we've always talk in the show, to decrease your portions size, if you decrease the size of your plate, you're going to finish that plate off. Your mind is going to have that visual cue and say, you know what, I polished off the plate. I'm satiated. If you have a massive plate and you only halfway through it, you're visual queue as well, I got to keep on tracking, let's go, let's keep eating.