There is an old saying, “show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” Research suggests we can adapt it to, “show me your friends and I’ll show you your waistline.”

How much food your dining companion eats has a big influence on how much you eat. This is good news if you have a health conscious dinner partner and not such good news if your dinner partner is the type who makes four trips to the all-you-can eat buffet.

The research shows that social factors are a powerful influence on consumption. When the companion eats very little, people suppress their food intake and eat less than they normally would if alone.

If the social model eats a large amount, people have the freedom to eat their normal intake, or even more…

Instead of relying on internal signals like hunger or a feeling of fullness, people look to others to decide how much to eat without even realizing it.

The effect is observed in many different situations: with healthy and unhealthy snack foods, during meals, when the diner has been deprived of food for up to a day, and among children, and it occurs independent of people’s body weight.

You don’t even have to be dining together for this to work. Just knowing your partner ate a cheeseburger with fries for dinner is enough to give you permission to do the same.

It even occurs when the companion is not physically present and diners are simply given a written indication of what that other person ate.

If you are trying to lose weight, it’s not just about portion size and counting calories. The company you keep matters too.

Choose your dinner partner wisely.  Remember, you are what your friends eat.

When I am trying to be “good,” I eat berries for dessert. New research suggests that eating berries BEFORE a meal may be an even better strategy.

In addition to being a healthy snack, the study shows that those who consumed fresh berries as a late afternoon snack ate 16% less of their dinner than those who had a calorie equivalent snack of “candy berries.” (You know the kind—think gummy bears with a berry flavor and shape). The fresh berry eaters were satisfied with a smaller dinner. They were instructed to eat until they were full and they chose to eat less.

There is strong evidence that eating berries benefits the brain too. Blueberry-fed rats have better memories than their standard-chow fed peers. They also demonstrated better balance and coordination (the task was to traverse a rotating rod—the equivalent of a turning balance beam). Most impressive was how age-related deficits were reversed in the berry-munching rats.

Stressed out young rats also benefit from consuming a diet full of berries. Both behavior and cognitive function improved when more color in the form of berries was added to their diet. Studies in real live people support the finding in rats. When researchers gave young adults a cup and a half of blueberries, their mood improved.

On that note, pass the berries. Hold the whipped cream.

Everyone is in a hurry these days but eating on the go is not the answer. Sorry Go-Gurt and pre-packaged cereal (Just add milk!) but taking a break to eat is well worth it.

A recent study showed how people who sit down to eat are more likely to make healthier choices and cultivate better eating habits. In fact, research suggests that eating on the go may even fuel hunger.

A New York Times article explains:

Eating on the go may not even register in the mind as eating, and may even register as exercise…The trick is to eat in a conscious and focused way.

Participants who ate cereal bars while walking ate five times as much when they were offered a snack later on, compared with those who had eaten while sitting down. Indeed, eating on the go may even be worse than eating in front of the television.

The lead researcher explains the value of pressing pause during a busy day and how taking time out to eat boosts energy and productivity:

It’s important to punctuate your day with breaks so that you can recharge and take stock as a means to relieve stress and work more effectively. It’s also important to turn eating into an occasion so that food is registered and eaten mindfully.

Take time to eat and sit with a friend whenever you can. I guarantee the food will taste even better.

A large body of scientific research indicates that music positively influences sports and exercise. Dr. Costas Karageorghis, a leader in sports psychology, has conducted dozens of clinical trials with a broad range of professional and amateur athletes including tennis players, long and short distance runners, basketball players, bicyclists and more.

Dr. Karageorghis’ findings show that music “distracts people from exhaustion and pain, increases endurance, boosts mood and even increases metabolic efficiency.” People who exercise while listening to music not only experience an increase in endurance by as much as 15%, but are also left happier and more satisfied by the workout. Music is particularly useful for getting through that last push or extra mile, perhaps because music redirects an exerciser’s attention from the not-so-pleasant sensations of physical exhaustion. Anyone who has ever been to a spinning class at Soul Cycle knows the value of a great song. In fact, spinning teachers are often valued as much for their playlist as they are for their enthusiasm and skill.

So what music is suited for exercise? The researchers used Queen, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Madonna in their experiments. As intuition suggests, music with more beats per minute and louder low-frequency sounds work best.

Bottom line:  Turn it on and pump it up. As an aside, out of consideration for others, may I suggest skipping “Pump Up the Jam.”

When Save the Children was invited into Vietnam to fight malnutrition, they asked an employee, Jerry Sternin, to open the office. It was a serious challenge. Malnutrition was widespread and seemingly unsolvable. There were countless reasons why: poverty, poor sanitation, ignorance about nutrition and lack of clean water.

Sternin described the analysis of the situation as TBU “true but useless.” Instead of being paralyzed by this overwhelming information, he employed a different strategy. Rather than focusing on all the malnourished children, he searched for examples of children living in poor villages who were not malnourished. He looked for exceptions to the rule.

Sternin’s strategy was to search for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy despite their advantages, that meant malnourishment was not inevitable.  Furthermore, the mere existence of healthy kids provided hope for a practical, short-term solution. Sternin knew he couldn’t fix the “root causes.” But if a handful of kids were staying healthy against the odds, why couldn’t every kid be healthy?

By observing the way that mothers of these healthy kids fed their children differently (they added cheap sweet potato greens, shrimp and crab into the food, they fed their children the same amount of food but spread it out into four meals a day instead of two larger ones and they hand fed their children rather than allowing them to feed themselves) they learned a simple way to fix a seemingly unfixable problem.

What can we learn from this? Don’t be deterred by TBU (true but useless information). Instead of troubleshooting, look for bright spots.