Reorganise your kitchen & Lose Weight!

Making small tweaks to how your kitchen is organised can help you eat healthier and shed the kilos.

If you struggle to manage your weight, or to lose it, your kitchen may be partly to blame. From the size of your dinner plates, to clutter on the countertop, a number of factors can have an impact on what you eat and how much.

Dr Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food & Brand Laboratory, has spent 25 years researching mindless eating and the simple changes we can make in our environment – such as our kitchen – to avoid weight gain. He refers to this approach to losing weight as being “slim by design”.

“When people try to lose weight they count calories, keep food diaries and read labels incessantly. It becomes a 24/7 job,” says Dr Wansink.

“But if a person can change a few things in their immediate environment – how they set up their refrigerator or how they set their table, for example, they can eat less without having to think about it. It’s easier to be slim by design than to be slim by willpower.”

Dr Wansink is currently turning his “slim by design” research and principles into a new health program in the UK. The program will help educate health organisations, businesses and the general public about how they can better manage their weight by relying less on willpower and more on the design of their everyday environment, starting with their kitchen.

Here, Dr Wansink outlines 10 changes you can make in your kitchen to help you lose kilos or avoid weight gain in the first place.

Have a fruit bowl