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.

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Bethany Sanders wrote about this topic just recently, but after having asked some restaurants recently about the calorie counts in some appetizers, I had to put in my two cents worth here. Here is a rather unorthodox suggestion the next time you go out to eat and order an appetizer -- ask the server for a nutrition sheet on the calorie counts and fat grams in that "small" order or cheese sticks. Be prepared to do a double-take if you get the information.

There are even reports of some appetizers having 2,000 calories or more -- which is enough for some people...for an entire day. Since restaurants don't have to list -- by law -- the nutrition facts for almost all items served, I have to give credit for the chain restaurants who post this information on their respective websites. It's how I plan some dinners before I even get to the restaurant -- because "winging it" upon arrival can leave you with a 1,000-calorie dinner sometimes, and that is just too much for a single meal.

How about ordering a meal based on taste and calorie count instead of "how big the portion is?" I've seen several friends recently that judge restaurants on how much meal they can get for their dollar, which is the absolute worst thing to gauge a meal's nutrition on.

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'I cheated on my diet by having that piece of cake. The day is blown, so I might as well have another. Ooh, chips. Why not have a few? I'll do better tomorrow.'

Does this sound familiar to you? It does to me -- I used to tell myself these kinds of things to justify pigging out. It happened especially around the holidays, when I am surrounded by treats and firmly loyal to the promise that once New Year's hit, I would make a resolution and stick to it. But over the past couple of years, I have come to realize that there will always be excuses to binge on junk food and there really is no time to be healthy like the present. That's not to say that I can never eat cake again -- I can and I do. But now I understand that even though I had the cake, I can still make healthy choices for the rest of the day.

If you find clever ways of justifying your overeating, read this. It exposes these justifacations and offers suggestions to avoid them. They also have some great healthy holiday cooking tips at the bottom. Check it out -- you might be glad you did.

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