Yet the heavier a person was – American or French – the more they relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they relied on whether they felt full.13.

Just as we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten simply by relying on internal cues, we can’t really tell how much we’ve gained or lost without some external benchmark.

In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.

People were almost twice as likely to reach for a comfort food when they were happy than when they were sad.

There’s only one thing that’s strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.

Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you’re overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you’re sporting the same paunch.

We can turn the food in our life from being a temptation or a regret to something we guiltlessly enjoy. We can move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.

As long as we believe it is food that causes us to overeat, we are lost. Television, friends, and weather seem pretty unrelated to what we eat. That’s why they have such a powerful effect on us.

It’s about as close to an established fact as things get in the social sciences: People who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.

The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.