Lean Writer, Fat Word Count? Engineering Your Environment for Default Success
By Jan O'Hara | May 18, 2015 |
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a writer in possession of a good premise must be in want of a functioning brain with which to execute it. Said brain is best nourished by blood pumped by a healthy heart contained within a healthy body, yes? Unfortunately, we Westerners live in an environment which discourages activity and encourages overeating. Indeed, some have gone so far as it label it “toxic”. The result? More than 70% of us are losing the battle to stay trim and fit.
On WU we’ve had several conversations about staying active and reducing sitting time. (Don’t Take Author Obesity Sitting Down and Becoming a Stand-up Writer.) That’s excellent. Unfortunately, it’s also insufficient. It takes me 15 minutes to consume a grande Carmel Macchiato with soy milk, but 1 hour and 10 minutes of brisk walking to work it off.
In the hierarchy of lifestyle medicine, this is why diet is proclaimed king to exercise’s queen.
Hope for Science-based, Simple Solutions
We all know that diets don’t work. We can talk about the science of this in another post, but willpower is a finite and easily exhausted resource. Turns out it takes as little as 15 minutes of mental effort to diminish the brain’s supply of glucose, thus undermining the part of the brain which weighs the desires of our future self against the present-day temptation.
Nor does it help to frame food choices as a moral decision (i.e. apples = good, chocolate bars = bad). If we do, it’s not long before we:
1) brew an outright home-grown rebellion or
2) deal with the Healthy Halo Effect—having made the morally superior choice to eat a salad, we feel entitled to eat the burger and cookie, thus consuming more calories than we would have otherwise done, all while living in denial about the outcome.
So if white-knuckling doesn’t work, and morality-based decisions backfire, what can move us forward?
If only it was possible to tweak our environment so that healthful food choices could be made by default. If only there was a research team dedicated to disseminating science-based recommendations on how to mindlessly reduce caloric intake on an incremental basis.
Happily, there is such a group. But before we pay them a quick visit, care to take a brief quiz on your food-environment literacy?
Pretest
- The maximum size of my dinner plate should be ___ inches.
- Assuming two glasses have the same volumetric capacity, which shape encourages me to pour less liquid: short and wide, or tall and skinny?
- What object should be given a prominent place on my kitchen counter?
- True or false: When asked to estimate the calories contained within a specific meal, heavy participants are less accurate than their skinnier counterparts?
- In a kitchen designed to facilitate slimness, the freezer will be in which position on the fridge: top, side, or bottom?
- My fridge should contain no more than ___ juices or soft drinks (diet or regular) or energy drinks in single-serving containers.
- On average we control what percent of our family’s nutrition?
- What item should be placed in the front center of a breakfast cupboard?
- True or false: When it comes to measuring out food portions, food researchers and professional cooks—the experts—are able to compensate for cues like bowl size, spoon size, etc.
What Is in the Drinking Water of Upstate New York?
Tucked into the small town of Ithaca, New York, population 110,000, lies Cornell University. It houses not one but two food research giants.
The first I’ll mention only briefly. For the science behind what to put on your appropriately-sized plate, read The China Study, by Thomas Campbell & T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. It’s the largest study ever conducted on the relationship between food and health. (Hint: the science points clearly to the benefits of a whole-foods plant-based diet.) Or check out Campbell’s website, Nutrition Studies.
The second is the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, run by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. Dubbed the Sherlock Holmes of food, his tools are considerably odder than a magnifying glass: scent-permeated dishes, hidden scales, hidden cameras, refilling soup bowls, test restaurants, test kitchens, etc. His mission? To uncover the psychology behind food behavior.
According to Wansink, the average person makes more than 200 decisions about food every day and most of these are made unconsciously. He says:
Everyone—every single one of us—eats how much we eat largely because of what’s around us. We overeat not because of hunger but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. This list is almost as endless as it’s invisible.
Wansink and team have spent the last several decades deconstructing these subterranean clues. They’ve disseminated their research in numerous peer-reviewed studies and commercial publications, serving consumers and industry. In many instances, the information helps craft solutions that are wins for both. For instance, he was behind the invention of the 100-calorie packs; they give consumers a “pause button” during consumption, objectively decreasing calorie intake, and allow food manufacturers to sell us less food at higher margins.
If you struggle to maintain an ideal weight, as I do, consider checking out the following references connected to his work. I recommend them because they:
- help you engineer your environment for success, providing a range of solutions from the incredibly simple and cheap to the challenging and expensive. An example of one tip: when faced with a calorie-dense food, avoid variety in presentation. As the variety increases, so will your consumption. (e.g. If given M & Ms with 10 color variations, participants mindlessly consume 77% more than their 7-variety counterparts.) When trying to encourage the consumption of healthful food, the converse is true.
- help you understand and guard against the cues which engineer excessive eating.
- take the issue of morality out of weight struggles and reduce it to a mechanistic, manageable approach.
Resources for Re-engineering Your Food Environment
- Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think—Brian Wansink, Ph.D. An accessible and practical read which primarily focuses on changing your home environment.
- Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Home, School, Grocery Stores, Restaurants, and More—Brian Wansink. Extends the work in Mindless Eating to other settings and provides a checklist of practical steps which you can use to document your baseline environment and your improvement. The section on food-grazing, or working from home, will be particularly relevant to writers.
- For a brief introduction to the material in his books, plus worksheets and teaching guides, check out the Mindless Eating website.
Answers to the quiz
- 9-10 inches.
- Tall and narrow. This simple change will reduce your calorie consumption from beverages by 30%. For best results, keep the glasses less than 12 ounces unless serving water, in which case glasses should be 16 ounces or more.
- A fruit bowl—should contain 2 or more fruits and be located within 2 feet of the most common pathway in the kitchen.
- False—whether male or female, old or young, trim or challenged, all people underestimated their food intake. As food portions increase, so do the margins of error in all groups. To quote Wansink: “It is ‘meal size,’ not ‘people size,’ that determines how accurate we’ll be at estimating how many calories we’ve eaten. That Popsicle-stick skinny person eating a 2,000-calorie Thanksgiving dinner will underestimate how much he’s eaten by just as much as the heavy person eating a 2,000-calorie pizza dinner. The trouble is that the heavy person tends to eat a whole lot more large meals.”
- The bottom.
- No more than 1 serving per household inhabitant.
- 72%.
- Oatmeal of any variety.
- False! Nobody is immune to these cues, though nobody believes they are influenced by them, either.
Final Thoughts
If our food environment has the subliminal ability to shape our shape, might our writing environment have the capacity to shape our word count? There’s no reason why we can’t take the same investigative spirit exhibited by Wansink and apply it to our writing routine. We could suss out less obvious factors than whether we’ve started the day with our internet blocker engaged.
For instance, does it make a difference if you write in a sunny room versus one lit only by the computer and desk lamp? What if you write in your bathrobe versus when you’re dressed? If you’re frustrated with your productivity, why not become a student of your life?
What say you, Unboxeders? Do these resources interest you? Have you reverse-engineered your writing life? If so, what surprising discoveries did you make about hidden hinderers versus hidden enhancers? How did you do in the food quiz?
A USA Today bestselling author, former family physician and academic, Jan O’Hara (she/her) left the world of medicine behind to follow her dreams of becoming a writer. She writes love stories that zoom from wackadoodle to heartfelt in six seconds flat: (Opposite of Frozen; Cold and Hottie; Desperate Times, Desperate Pleasures). Her latest Christmas novella, The Cowboy’s Comeback Christmas, is part of a 9-author-strong anthology (A Cowboy This Christmas: A Sweet Romance Anthology). She also contributed to Author in Progress, a Writer’s Digest Book edited by Therese Walsh.
Jan, This is such an interesting post. Not only from a healthy living/ writer POV, but from a world view. if our environment shapes our productivity and our health, it’s only logical that poverty and war are crimes against humanity… There are so many facets to to what you posted here this morning. Thanks for the muse.
It is thought provoking isn’t it, Bernadette? Though I firmly believe in the concept of personal responsibility, the environment shapes us in ways we can’t fathom. The goal, as I see it, is to become conscious and proactive in said shaping.
Jan,
I love that you’re talking about this. I bought into the ‘suffering artist’ thing when I was younger (smoke, drink, stay up late, repeat), until someone wise pointed out to me that a healthy, well-rested person is a more productive one. As an Irish-Italian raised in a very food-centric culture, I can attest to the habitual underestimation of intake due to frequency of weddings, funerals, showers, reunions and holidays. One has to make a very conscious choice to step back from all that. Also, in our larger culture, most of us are never more than an arm’s length away from a snack. So, as you point out, above, the deck is stacked against us. A ‘hidden enhancer’ for me has become the cultivation of discipline. Without it, I wouldn’t write. Without good health and a rested brain, I wouldn’t write much, or well. Ultimately, I want to write good books, and so…
I passed the quiz with a high ‘C’. But I think I should get extra credit for eating Oatmeal all year round. Thanks for a thoughtful post!
Susan, oatmeal is good stuff, particularly the steel cut variety.
Yours is a tricky food culture for sure. Glad you’ve found workarounds.
As for rest, yes, the medical literature shows that a fatigued brain is a vulnerable brain. So in your pursuit of discipline, you’ve been very wise to make that a pillar.
Hi Jan.
You are an MD, and science-oriented, so it makes sense for you to discuss writing matters in quantitative terms. I am on the opposite end of the continuum, interested primarily in qualitative distinctions in writing that don’t lend themselves to measurement. For example, you conclude your post with the following:
“If our food environment has the ability to shape our shape, might our writing environment have the capacity to shape our word count?”
Leaving aside the simple truth that sentient beings, not environments have abilities and capacities, you seem–at least in this instance–to be most concerned with productivity. But is word count at the heart of the creative process for writers? In one sense, I guess you could say it is: no word count, no story. But that’s not what I understand you to mean. You are talking about quantitative output, modifying the writing environment in order to increase the number of words written per hour or day.
I don’t care about that, and I doubt most of the work I admire was written by authors who fretted much over word count.
But this is true as well: if changing the environment can help a writer realize her goals, then thinking about it makes sense.
Thanks once again for giving your readers food for thought (uh oh, a rogue pun, sorry).
You won a smile for your pun, Barry.
I focused on word count, because that makes for a sexy headline, but I fully agree that’s only one measure of writing success; possibly the least valuable. (Just as weight, in and of itself, cannot be the sole predictor of health.) But you can put qualitative values through the same process.
For instance, you’ve heard of the pain scale in which adults rate their pain from 0 to 10, or children choose the face which most resembles their internal feeling? It’s a scientifically valid way of determining what factors modify pain and is particularly useful when studying intrapersonal differences. So why not scale the value you most desire and study it? It might be harder to detect 10% changes this way, of course, but one wouldn’t know until they tried.
I deleted high-fructose corn syrup and lost seven pounds in about six weeks. Stuff is in everything! No other attempts at food management, just regularly walk a mile and some Sunday evening yoga. The exercise wasn’t making a dent. Deleting HFCS and the weight came off.
That’s a challenging measure, Robin, especially for Americans. Good for you. After a washout period, I bet you recrafted your taste/inclination for sweets.
Jan, your posts are always way outside the box and they always make me think — thank you for that. I especially love this line: “In the hierarchy of lifestyle medicine, this is why diet is proclaimed king to exercise’s queen.”
So true. I maintain a fairly active lifestyle, but it wasn’t until I started actively tracking what I ate that I was able to lose a few pounds. (I love the free app My Fitness Pal for this.) It wasn’t that I was making horrible food choices, it was just that some of those foods had way more calories than I realized. I still enjoy them, but in moderation. (A half an avocado instead of a whole one, for example.)
I’m looking forward to reading the links you shared. Thank you!
Food journals are an excellent way to modify one’s diet and free apps have been a boon to that, Liz. I’m more familiar with Lose It but have heard nothing but good about My Fitness Pal.
I’m glad if my pieces make you stretch. It’s the curse/blessing of my holistic brain in that I can connect anything to anything. ;) And thank you for your help once again!
Great article – very apt for all of us writers that live sedentary lifestyles.
As a copywriter, the battle is two fold: we’ve got to fight the weight and the word count. Lean copywriter/Lean copy!
Very true, copywriter. At least your motto creates a pleasant sense of alliteration and resonance. ;)
Okay, Boss, I’m back from measuring our plates. (10″, thank goodness.) Seriously, my neighbor is a sales rep specializing in dinnerware, and she’s bemoaned this bigger and bigger plate trend for a long time. Seems like it’s a way to sell dinnerware (you must have bigger plates for your next dinner party!).
I feel fortunate that snacking is not a part of my mindset, so I rarely eat mindlessly. And our kitchen feels empty without a bowl of fruit (like now, only a few bananas and little oranges left, must go to market soon). Not that I couldn’t stand to lose a few, or drink a few less pints, but I’ve found that walking is key to balance in my dietary life. Well, to life in general. If I’m not getting in my walks, I’m out of balance.
Thanks for all the research and hard work that I know went into this excellent post, Jan!
I too was pleased when most of our dinnerware met the recommended criteria, V. A good part of that was mimicry of my parents’ lifestyle, which put me in the unconsciously lucky camp. (Also, my affinity for unbreakable dishes which meant we’re an old-fashioned Corelle household.)
I would like to learn to be a non-snacker!
As for your walking, maybe this can be the subject of another post, but exercise has been shown to boost willpower. Not only that, in his Slim By Design book, Wansink comments that mental balance and weight are intrinsically intertwined. They find that improving one improves the other, and vice versa. So while you already know how important the walks are to your well-being and physical health, the science would back you up. Aren’t you thrilled to know that? ;)
Hi Jan! I could definitely posit a correlation between lack of sleep and increase of fluff in writing. :-) There might also be a correlation to how many times the word “mommy” is yelled in a given half hour of ‘writing’ time and how choppy the writing is.
As a fun aside, my husband has been a test subject in some of Wansink’s studies here in Ithaca, and his description of what those food ‘experiments’ are like from the participant viewpoint is truly eye opening. The best was the bowl of soup where the level of the soup remained the same no matter how much he ate. So he couldn’t decide how much he’d eaten (and how full he was) based on volume reduction.
Neat, Jeanne. That six degrees of separation is a real life phenomenon, isn’t it? That soup bowl experiment is both brilliant and an attention-grabber.
If I had time for a third career, I’d want to work in Wansink’s lab. Seems like a fascinating place.
As for writing and lifestyle, yeah, it won’t be long before you’ll be looking for the sneer-to-word-count ratio. Teenagers. ;)
I’d love to work in Wansink’s lab too. He’s doing some fascinating research!
Jan, I’m a bony sort, so I don’t worry about the weight too much, but I do have a sugar tooth. Or sets of sugar teeth. I really do act out that Healthy Halo effect: last night’s dinner was seared ahi on a bed of salad. That was so healthy I had to have two big chocolate-chip cookies afterward. Slathered in peanut butter. Mmmm…
I’ve only been editing lately, not writing, so I’ve been paring word count, rather than adding. Oh, another chance at a sugary reward!
My son can eat like you and then stop, Tom. It’s a gift.
What a different way to look at it. I love the challenge. I want to see what will happen when I change where and how I write. It will be different.
May your experimentation be fruitful, Annay.
Count me in as a huge Brian Wansink fan! As you noted, willpower is a limited resource, so it’s easier for me to stick to healthy eating when I engineer my environment to push me in that direction. That way, I don’t have to think about it anymore.
My last job illustrated the huge role of environment and the limitations of willpower. The office had unlimited chips and snacks in the kitchen, which was 10 feet from my cubicle, and candy jars by the copier, water cooler, and recycling bin (in other words, everywhere). They also had extra treats at least once a week. It wasn’t easy resisting all that, especially near the end of a stressful work day, so people usually gained 10-15 pounds their first year there.
The good news: I left that job 1.5 years ago and lost 13 pounds without thinking.
Grace, your past work environment sounds like Google. Unless my memory fails me, Wansink worked with them to counteract their version of the freshman fifteen. I wonder how that went. Surely they’d have the data. ;)
It’s a fascinating world, isn’t it? So much to learn. I’m delighted you found an employment situation which contributed to your health rather than subtracted from it.