Don't let distraction lead to weight gain

How often does this happen: You're watching your favorite show on TV, munching on a snack as you do. Going into this whole situation, your intention was to only eat a small portion of that food, but you instead ended up devouring the whole thing. Are you to blame? Well, yeah. Completely? Mmmm ... pretty much. C'mon, there has to be something else to blame? OK, fine, you can blame the TV show a little bit.

This assignment of blame is not entirely unfounded. Obviously, the TV show itself didn't make you eat more (leaving out the psychological effects of some commercials, of course); rather, it was the distraction the TV show created that may have contributed to your overindulgence. For example, RealAge.com cites a related study, wherein women who ate snack cakes while playing a video game wanted to eat more of the food than the women who ate without any distraction.

Evidently, if you eat the same food for a period of time, your palate essentially becomes bored. You feel full sooner and don't want as much of that food. This is known as sensory-specific satiety, say the folks at RealAge, and it helps keeps your appetite in check. But get distracted for an extended period of time, and this appetite-control mechanism gets turned off.