Brian Wansink, Ph.D., and Author of "Mindless Eating"

That's Fit: In your book, you mention calorie-compensation, a phenomenon that can occur when people exercise to "make up" for the calories they burned, by eating more. How can you avoid it?

Wansink: One of the biggest things that causes diets to initially fail -- just initially, not over the long run -- ends up being compensation. Some of that is compensation related to exercise, the other part is compensation related to rewarding yourself for having eating a healthy lunch or for not having eaten a dessert. If you're rewarding yourself for not snacking, you may compensate by eating a larger dinner. In terms of compensation related to exercise, it's due to two things. First of all, people grossly overestimate the number of calories they burn when they exercise. They can exercise for a couple of hours and eat a Snicker's bar and erase that in a minute. The second thing is they psychologically want to reward themselves for having gone through the inconvenience and efforts of exercise.

The best thing you can do is to not look at exercise as a fat-burning activity. Look at it as being a toning and strengthening activity. Think of exercise as something you're doing to look younger and stronger. For people who want the overall goal of looking well and feeling better, it works well as a goal. If you change your frame you end up not overcompensating, because you're not using the calorie-in and calorie-out [point of view].

That's Fit: In your book, you say that while giving up "mindless eating" may be difficult, changing our habits to "eating mindlessly better" is possible. What are some of the ways we can do that?

Wansink: Let's say for instance that your big problem is snacking -- that's your big diet danger zone -- you need to put an easy rule together that let's you snack when you want to, but only if you want to snack really, really bad. Some people say to themselves, "Look, I can eat any sweet snack I want, as long as I eat a piece of fruit before the sweet snack." And if somebody doesn't want to eat an apple bad enough to eat a Snicker's bar, that's a pretty mindless way to say, "Ok, I guess I wasn't that hungry after all."

At restaurants, the very easy thing to do is to use the "restaurant rule of two." You say to yourself, "I can have an entrée, and I can have any two additional items -- whether it's bread, dessert, a glass of wine, but I just can't have more than two." You just have to choose what means the most to you. These sorts of mindless eating solutions can help you mindlessly eat less, without mindlessly eating.

That's Fit: Can you explain the dangers of buying in bulk, or "family" sizes?

Wansink: Let me just say, I've owned club memberships for years. I shop there regularly. The huge benefit in buying in bulk is you can save a lot of money. But there are two big dangers about buying in bulk. It can lead to overeating -- which can be in the form of eating way too much, or way too frequently. [And] it can involve wastefulness when you throw something away because it has gone stale. When people buy something that's bulk, they will finish 50 percent within one week of buying it. What happens after that is people tend to burn out -- you don't eat the rest of it, it goes stale, you gorge yourself to the point of regret. So what seems like a great savings actually doesn't turn out to be.

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