If you change up to three habits, you may lose more. “For 90% of us, the solution to mindless eating is not mindful eating – our lives are just too crazy and our willpower’s too wimpy,” he writes in his new book, “Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life.” 
 
 The book includes ways restaurants, schools and other institutions can offer more healthful food, and provides scorecards for readers to figure out whether their homes and workplaces, the restaurants and supermarkets they patronize and their kids’ school meals, are designed for slim. “What we’ve found over and over is that making one small change, like eating off a smaller plate, leads to a small weight loss, and then that triggers making more changes. “It’s so much easier to be ‘slim by design’ than by using willpower,” Wansink says. Restaurants and food companies are likely to change if they can make more money, Wansink noted in a telephone interview. “The assessment helps determine what kind of eater a person is, so we can give them tips that work for them,” says Wansink. Meals stuffers who are emotional eaters, live alone, and buy carryout food or order in at least three days per week. A parent who doesn’t like to cook, but who wants the family to eat better or eat less. Four different solutions 
 
 The four most essential lifestyle changes for adults who want to lose weight are as follows: 
 
 1. Get this: Woman with a box of breakfast cereal visible anywhere in the kitchen weighed 21 pounds more than that neighbor who kept it in the cupboard, Wansink writes. The average woman who had potato chips on her counter weighed 8 pounds more than a neighbor who did not, Wansink writes. --To lessen cravings while in the supermarket, chew gum, Wansink says. Shoppers who kept their mouths busy with sugarless gum while shopping bought 7% less junk food, Wansink and his colleagues found in another study. --Pay attention to the menu.
– Diets require serious willpower, and that makes them hard to stick with—but a Cornell psychologist says you can lose weight without having to work so hard. His plan sounds a lot like one of those online ads: Lose weight with this one trick. The idea, as the Los Angeles Times reports, is to make some manageable changes to your surroundings rather than to yourself. "What we’ve found over and over is that making one small change, like eating off a smaller plate, leads to a small weight loss, and then that triggers making more changes. Within a year, a person’s lost 35 pounds without ever 'dieting,'" Dr. Brian Wansink tells Quartz. Choosing a smaller plate is just one of several options he puts forward in a new book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. You might also try getting rid of that bag of chips or box of cereal on your counter and replacing it with a fruit bowl, Quartz reports. In Wansink's research, women who kept cereal on the counter weighed 21 pounds more than those who avoided doing so. Some other tips: Don't enter your home through the kitchen, and don't eat at your desk while at work. And try chewing gum while food shopping; gum chewers bought 7% less junk food than others, another study suggested. (Failing all that, you could go for the rather disturbing "fat-shaming fork.")