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].

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Recently, I wrote about how late night eating is no worse for your waistline than eating at any other time of day. That's true, and I'm glad that myth about late-night eating has finally been put to bed. However, eating at night isn't without a caveat.

For many people, eating late at night consists of snacking on popcorn, chips or other treats. If these treats are in moderation, that's not such a bad thing. But late-night eating often equals mindless eating, and that's never a good thing. Just think about it -- you're watching the latest episode of Lost and munching on chips straight from the bag. Before you know it, half the bag is gone and you don't even know how it happened.

Just because you have a green light to eat late at night doesn't mean you can eat mindlessly. Opt for healthier snacks such as cut veggies and hummus and always measure out your snacks so you don't eat more than you intend.

If you have a diet soda instead of a regular one, do you think that means you have more "room" for a big piece of cake? It sounds kind of crazy, doesn't it? Odds are the piece of cake would be more calories than the soda, and what does one thing have to do with the other anyway?

According to Brian Wansick PhD, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, that type of reasoning isn't unusual. In the Journal of Consumer Research, Wasnick states "We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy, such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131% more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald's, that don't make this claim."

So when we perceive a restaurant as being "healthy," we become more liberal in our choices -- potentially choosing more calories than we might have consumed at a restaurant with fewer healthy choices. Wansick calls habits like ordering cookies to go with your low-cal sub the "halo effect." While having cookies or other treats isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, it's the fact that many people are consuming these calories mindlessly; they aren't viewing them as treats, but more of a regular item that they have made space for by eating foods that they perceive as healthy.

Remember, restaurants don't always tell the whole-truth-and-nothing-but about their nutrition information. Check out Bev's post and learn why it's more like the whole-lie-and-a-bigger-butt.

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