If you're guilty of overeating when you get home from work like I am -- seriously, every single thing in my kitchen starts looking appealing around 9 pm -- science has some excellent news for how you can break your late-night binge habit.
Clean up your kitchen.
I know, it sounds way too easy. But according to a small, new study published in Environment & Behavior, cluttered kitchens may cause people to overeat.
For the study, researchers recruited 100 women. The women were then led into a neat or messy kitchen and given tasks: either to write about times they felt in control or times they felt out of control.
There was also food placed in the kitchen, and participants were told they could eat as much of the food as they wanted.
Ready for these results? Although the environments didn't have an impact on how much healthy food they ate (carrots and crackers), among the women who wrote about feeling out of control, the women in the messy kitchen ate twice as many cookies as the women in the tidy kitchen.
Their writing assignments also had impacts on calorie consumption. While in the messy kitchen, participants who wrote about times they felt in control ate fewer cookies than the people who wrote about feeling out of control.
So, if a messy kitchen is kind of your thing, first of all, that's gross. Second of all, you should probably clean it up in the name of your waistline and bikini season, which will be here sooner than you think.
Speaking of bikini season, if you're looking for other ways to slim down, we have 'em. Try drinking tea, eating more lean protein, keeping the refrigerator closed after dinner and eating more slowly.
Good luck!
Citations: A Cluttered Kitchen Can Nudge Us To Overeat, Study Finds (NPR)
