Rituals Are A Key To Using Intuitive Eating For Weight Loss
Part 1
Rituals are so powerful they can make us like carrots.
They can even make us like each other. The Journal of Family Psychology recently published a 50-year review of the benefits of adding rituals to our lives. They found rituals create greater marital satisfaction, academic achievement, self-worth, and stronger family bonds.
Rituals even act as tranquilizers. A University of Toronto study found that performing a ritual before a stressful task reduced anxiety and sensitivity to failure.
But can they help us lose weight?
Mindful Eating For Weight Loss
As it turns out, there are several studies showing rituals have a dramatic impact on appetite, satiety, and satisfaction. One field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake. Studies on mindful eating (which is loaded with rituals like putting your fork down after each bite) show pronounced and sustained weight loss. One study showed rituals can help people with food insecurity cope with hunger.
Perhaps the most interesting study (as well as the most admired and most often cited) was conducted by a behavioral economist who noticed her own quirky ritual.
“Whenever I order an espresso,” Dr. Kathleen Vohs told the Association For Psychological Science, “I take a sugar packet and shake it, open the packet, and pour a teeny bit of sugar in, and then taste. It’s never enough sugar, so I then pour about half of the packet in. The thing is, this isn’t a functional ritual, I should just skip right to pouring in half the packet.”
Vohs and her colleagues at Harvard conducted a series of now-famous experiments to investigate how these kinds of ritualistic behaviors might influence our perception and consumption of food.
In one experiment, participants were asked to eat a piece of chocolate with these instructions: “Without unwrapping the chocolate bar, break it in half. Unwrap half of the bar and eat it. Then, unwrap the other half and eat it.”
The other participants were instructed to eat the chocolate in any way they wanted.
The results? People performing the “ritual” rated the chocolate more highly, savored it longer, and were willing to pay more for it than the other group.
But hey, maybe the results were just a natural effect of thrilling foods like chocolate. Would the same thing happen with food that could put you to sleep, like carrots?
Surprisingly, it did. Participants who performed the ritual before eating the orange crunchy stuff liked the vegetable more, spent more time savoring it and were willing to pay more for it than non-ritual participants.
Now, why on earth would a tiny ritual have the power to improve the subjective taste of carrots… Carrots?! Because rituals create mindfulness. They make you pay more attention. You notice more of the food’s appearance, texture, and smell than if you just popped the carrots in your mouth. The ritual, small as it was, forced a delay in consumption and that created a phenomenon guaranteed to help you enjoy food: Anticipation.
Interestingly, Vohs found that rituals don’t work without personal involvement. For example, watching someone else methodically open the carrots doesn’t make it taste any better. You must be the one doing it.
Small and mundane rituals have such a powerful effect on us that Vohs plans to study the potential of performing rituals before surgery to see if people heal faster.
Why Rituals Help You Lose Weight
Ritual theorists (yes, it’s a job classification) believe the power of rituals come from their effect on core aspects of well-being—social bonds, meaning, purpose, identity and belonging.
As rituals improve well-being the effects can be seen downstream—stress relief, more focus, better self-control, increased self-worth, higher sensitivity, greater awareness, and better decision-making. All of which make weight loss easier.
Next week we'll delve further into exactly how rituals affect weight loss. Until then, check out our online weight loss class.
