The Weight Reducing Power Of Rituals
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?
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.
Food rituals also have inherent mechanisms that promote slimmer bodies. Let’s use wine to make the point. Following are two scenarios in which two people who don’t know each other well share a bottle of wine.
Scenario 1: With Little or No Rituals
Friend A opens the wine with a standard winged corkscrew and pours it into unremarkable wine glasses. Friend B raises her glass, says, “Cheers!” and the conversation begins. The two are a bit awkward with each other but the wine helps and they tear through the bottle in a half an hour.
Scenario 2: With Rituals
Friend A opens the wine with a standard winged corkscrew and pours it into unremarkable wine glasses. Friend B judges the appearance by holding the glasses up to the light. Both friends talk about the color, the opacity. They bond over this, each learning from the other.
They swirl the wine by placing two fingers on either side of the stem, making small circles with the base. Then they smell the wine. Twice, actually. The first inhale, from just outside the glass, comes in slow and long.
The second inhale, from inside the glass, comes sharp and abrupt. This helps them smell both the aromas that escape the glass and those that stay inside. They compare notes, playfully argue, and add to their knowledge.
Next, they place a small amount of wine in their mouths and perform the famous wine tasting slurp. This increases the number of aromas that go through the mouth to reach the nose, increasing the intensity of the flavors.
The comments start flying on the qualities of the wine—the fruitiness, the acidity, the tannins. The friends then transition to non-wine conversations. Each time more wine is poured they go through some version of the rituals just mentioned.
Even after an hour, they don’t finish the bottle, corking it after they’d gone through about two-thirds of it.
Discussion
The scenario with little or no rituals forced attention on the visceral pleasures of stress relief and improved mood. Meaning, they drank more for the effect of the alcohol than the taste of the wine.
Contrast this with the rituals scenario. Attention was directed toward the Epicurean pleasures—the smell, the look, the taste of the wine, along with its provenance. The friends also experienced visceral pleasures (the effect of the alcohol) but the emphasis was on the Epicurean.
In the first scenario, no rituals meant faster drinking. In the second, having rituals meant slower drinking. The time between ritual and sip created a greater anticipation for the wine, which made the friends want to savor rather than gulp.
Because it took longer to drink the wine, the companions in the rituals scenario more accurately sensed both their alimentary alliesthesia (how full they were with wine) and their sensory specific satiety (the decline in pleasure that comes from habituated taste buds).
This caused them to stop drinking earlier than the friends in Scenario 1.
The bottom line: The friends who engaged in rituals took in considerably less calories, alcohol and sugar while getting more pleasure out of the wine.
While I used wine as an example, these dynamics also apply to food. If you want to know the best way of using rituals to lose weight, check out the Neuroslim online course. It's based on the very same research you're reading in this article.
Now, let's do a deep dive into the research.
The Science on Rituals' Effect On Weight Loss
There’s evidence to show that habits and rituals related to eating can have an impact on food consumption. This includes things like eating with your family at the dinner table, cooking your food a specific way, or reaching for a fruit bowl whenever you’re craving a snack.
Any healthy behavior or action that becomes automated when you do it for a number of times can be beneficial for your health. When used properly, rituals can make you more attentive to what you’re eating and become a way of controlling your food intake, making healthy choices, keeping a healthy weight, and resisting harmful temptations without making a lot of effort to maintain the changes you’ve made.
A study composed of two experiments aimed to examine the effect of healthy habits on food consumption and food-related choice making. In the first experiment, 59 participants were randomly assigned into a healthy habit group or an unhealthy habit group.
By interacting with a series of pictures, they built a habit of either accepting chocolate or rejecting it. Additionally, both groups watched a comic video. A group was asked not to make any facial expressions and the other group was asked to watch with no facial expression restriction.
This test depleted the effort of the first group before they proceeded to the chocolate consumption task. The researchers found that the depletion made the unhealthy habit group consume less chocolate, but did not affect the healthy habit group. This experiment shows that healthy habits can prevent temptation to eat unhealthy when a person is most vulnerable after their self-control is depleted by other tasks [1].
In the second experiment, 56 participants were randomly assigned into a healthy habit group and an unhealthy habit group similarly to the first test. The first group built a habit of responding to a food cue by eating baby carrots, and the second group by eating M&Ms. Both groups went through an effort depletion task before they were asked to choose between baby carrots and M&Ms.
The researchers found that their choices were influenced by the presence of the cues that they learned were associated with the healthy or unhealthy habit.
Meaning that the healthy habit group chose baby carrots more often when presented with the habit cue that they learned in the experiment. Overall, this study shows that habits can help control your food intake and choices even in conditions of effort depletion and food cue temptations [1].
In another study, parents and their children were evaluated for the relationship between different dinner rituals and body mass index (BMI). The parents filled a questionnaire about their families’ dinner habits, and every member of the family had their weight and height measured by the researchers to calculate their BMI.
They found that rituals are closely related to the body mass index of both adults and children. Eating in the dining room, waiting at the table for others to finish, and talking positively about their day, were correlated with a lower BMI.
While eating with the TV on, and arguing at the dinner table, were associated with a higher BMI. This study shows that weight can be influenced by dinner rituals that dictate where you eat, how long you eat, and the social elements incorporated in your eating habits [2].
A study aimed at demonstrating the effect of food rituals on self-control was conducted in a series of experiments. In the first experiment, undergraduate women were randomized into a ritual group and a mindful eating control group. Both groups were asked to reduce their calorie intake by 10% in 5 days.
The first group was instructed to follow a pre-eating ritual consisting of cutting their food, rearranging the pieces a specific way and manipulating the utensils.
The second group was instructed to be mindful about their food and think about the experience while they’re eating. The researchers found that the ritual group consumed signifiantly less calories than the control group.
In the second experiment, participants were divided into 3 groups : a ritual group, a random gesture group, and a control group.
The ritual group followed a structured pre-eating ritual consisting mainly of a series of hand movements and were told that it’s their "carrot-eating ritual."
The random gesture group performed a chain of movements as well, but unlike the ritual group, it was random and not repetitive.
Both groups ate carrots twice, and in the third step they were asked to choose between another carrot or chocolate.
The results showed that the ritual group chose the carrot more often the the random gesture group and the control group. Which not only proves that rituals help with self-control, but also that the movements have to be repetitive through time and not random every time.
In the third and fourth experiments, participants were randomly assigned to a ritual group, a random gesture group and a control group.
After the ritual or the random gestures, they had to choose between a healthy snack and an unhealthy snack. After analyzing the results, the researchers found an explanation to the relationship between rituals and self-control.
Performing a ritual repetitively induces a feeling of high self-discipline. Which creates more self-control, that translates to a better commitment to the ritual, and it forms a loop where every element feeds the next [3].
Overall, these studies prove the effect of habits and rituals on food consumption. A healthy habit can protect from temptations of unhealthy food cues even in the conditions where effort is depleted.
Rituals, even silly ones like making hand gestures before meals, can increase feelings of self-discipline and improve self-control. Making it more likely to choose the healthier options, and to reduce food intake. Another study found that rituals can make eating more enjoyable and positively change our perception of food [4]. Making it a healthier alternative to food restriction.
References:
1. Lin, P. Y., Wood, W., & Monterosso, J. (2016). Healthy eating habits protect against temptations. Appetite, 103, 432–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.11.011
Quote: In our research, healthy habits protected against the unhealthy consequences often associated with reduced executive control. Habits thus can maintain healthy choices and small portions when people are not prepared to deliberate.
2. Wansink, B., & van Kleef, E. (2014). Dinner rituals that correlate with child and adult BMI. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.), 22(5), E91–E95. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.20629
Quote: To summarize, the ritual of where one eats and how long one eats seems to be the largest driver of both adult and child BMI. Eating in the kitchen or at the dining room table and remaining at the table until everyone is finished eating were both associated with lower BMIs for parents and children.
3. Tian, A. D., Schroeder, J., Häubl, G., Risen, J. L., Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2018). Enacting rituals to improve self-control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 114(6), 851–876. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000113
Quote: A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritual with healthy eating behavior increased the likelihood of choosing healthy food in a subsequent decision (Experiment 2), and enacting a ritual before a food choice (i.e., without being integrated into the consumption process) promoted the choice of healthy food over unhealthy food (Experiments 3a and 3b).
4. Vohs, K. D., Wang, Y., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2013). Rituals enhance consumption. Psychological science, 24(9), 1714–1721. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613478949
Quote: Four experiments tested the novel hypothesis that ritualistic behavior potentiates and enhances ensuing consumption--an effect found for chocolates, lemonade, and even carrots. Rituals enhance the enjoyment of consumption because of the greater involvement in the experience that they prompt.