Want to Lose Weight, Improve Your Diet? Start by Changing Your Kitchen

via healthline.com

Do you snack when you sip?

Google is known for making searches easy. But the company also found success when it set out to make it easier for its employees to improve their nutrition.

The Google Food Team and the Yale Center for Customer Insights joined forces to learn how making small changes in the kitchen break rooms could help employees make healthier food choices, reported the Harvard Business Review.

One aspect of the research uncovered how to stop the habit of reaching for a snack every time you have a cup of coffee or drink of water. Google experimented with putting free drinks and snack foods in different places.

When the beverage station and snack station were close by, people were 50 percent more likely to take a snack with their beverage. Researchers estimated that those who used the beverage station near the snack food gained a pound of fat per year for each daily cup of coffee.

Your kitchen redo takeaway: Make it easy to get water without being tempted to nosh in your own kitchen. Set up your home water cooler by the entrance to the kitchen, and keep those fattening snacks (crackers, cookies, and other snacks) as far from that entrance as possible.

Read the full article here.