Need to lose weight? Instead of changing yourself, you might consider changing your environment. 
 
 Making changes – big and small – to the world around you is much easier than mustering the willpower to refrain from eating high-calorie foods, says Brian Wansink, who has for years studied our eating habits, currently as director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. 
 
 And those changes can mean that your diet is more healthful without working so hard. 
 
 Wansink dismisses the popular idea that mindful eating is the way to eat what we need without overeating junk food. “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. 
 
 Restaurants and food companies are likely to change if they can make more money, Wansink noted in a telephone interview. “If a bunch of consumers say, 'Is there something you can come up with that's not French fries or a boring salad? I would eat here more often,'” then companies are likely to listen, he said. 
 
 They’re in the profits business, not in business to make people fat, he said. It’s a lesson Wansink and his students stumbled upon when they realized that the bigger the package of food, the more people ate of it, and that consumers would pay more for smaller packets that would help them control how much they ate. 
 
 Most of our lives have made us fat by design — Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University 
 
 “Eventually, Nabisco/Kraft gave my theory a run and launched the 100-calorie snack pack,” Wansink writes. It’s the sort of change that helps people eat less with no effort. 
 
 “Most of our lives have made us fat by design,” Wansink said. So it’s time, he said, to make ourselves thin the same way. Here are some of his findings and suggestions; pick those that work for you, he says. 
 
 --If you come home through your kitchen door, you’ll weigh more than your neighbor who goes home through another room. Solution? Kind of obvious. 
 
 --Wansink and his researchers spent a lot of time watching and cataloging the behavior of people who ate at buffet restaurants. The slim diners scouted out the entire spread before taking any food and then cherry-picked their favorites. Heavy diners went straight for the plates and started piling on from the start of the line. And thin diners sat far from the buffet facing away from it. You can guess what the others did. 
 
 --If your plate is the same color as your food, you’re likely to serve yourself 18% more food. You can either buy new dishes, or color-code your meals if you want to eat less. But here’s a hint: White plates and lots of pasta, potatoes and rice? Maybe not. Smaller plates are better, too. 
 
 --Clear the counters! The average woman who had potato chips on her counter weighed 8 pounds more than a neighbor who did not, Wansink writes. Big deal, it’s chips, you say? 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. 
 
 --If you are really serious, move your pantry food to a closet elsewhere in the house and that closet’s stuff into the kitchen closet. Or put up shelves in a faraway room to hold the food. That, Wansink writes, will decrease “browsing” for snacks and make you think before the food gets to your mouth. 
 
 --Buying in bulk saves money, right? But Wansink writes that one study showed people ate half the chips, cookies, ramen noodles and the like in the first week – regardless of how much they bought. What to do? Buy only healthful foods in bulk. Or, repackage the items once you get home and store some far from the kitchen, he writes. 
 
 --Pay attention to the menu. On average, Wansink writes, a dish described as “buttery” has 102 more calories than a similar one not described that way. Crispy? Adds 131 calories, he writes. 
 
 --To lessen cravings while in the supermarket, chew gum, Wansink says. When he and colleagues gave shoppers gum at the start of a shopping trip, they bought 7% less junk food than their empty-mouthed fellow shoppers. ||||| The best diet may be the one you don’t know you’re on. 
 
 If you change just one lifestyle habit, instead of struggling to power through a traditional “diet,” you can lose two or more pounds each week. If you change up to three habits, you may lose more. Sounds simple? It can be, according to Dr. Brian Wansink, consumer behavior psychologist and marketing professor at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University who is on a mission to end dieting through what he calls “mindless eating,” which he details in his new book, Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. 
 
 Wansink is one of a growing number of academics, researchers, social scientists and physicians who support the “small changes theory” as a means to combat weight loss and fight obesity. Simply put: Research and statistics show that small changes can have big payoffs. 
 
 “One thing that happens with people who are overweight is that they often feel their situation isn’t solvable, and they are on the verge of giving up,” explains Wansink. “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.’ That’s our goal.” 
 
 Wansink coined the term “mindless eating” with his 2006 bestseller, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Now he and his cohort are applying the values of “mindless eating” to weight loss, advocating that small lifestyle and food habits changes can be so easy that you don’t have to think about them for them to be effective. Best of all: Mindless eating negates the need for willpower. 
 
 “It’s so much easier to be ‘slim by design’ than by using willpower,” Wansink says. “You make one change, it’s done. Willpower is a 24/7 unending job.” 
 
 Who ends up being overweight 
 
 Wansink and his colleagues have delineated 62 typical types of eaters. “The assessment helps determine what kind of eater a person is, so we can give them tips that work for them,” says Wansink. According to their findings, the five most typical types of overweight eaters are: 
 
 Meal stuffers who don’t cook, who live with their families and watch four or more hours of TV per day. Meals stuffers who are emotional eaters, live alone, and buy carryout food or order in at least three days per week. Snack grazers who do most of their snacking away from home, are female, and who prefer salty snacks or baked goods more than candy (except chocolate). A parent who doesn’t like to cook, but who wants the family to eat better or eat less. Women (25-35) and men (45-60) who eat more than eight lunches or dinners away from home, and who eat more for the taste experience than to fill up on food. 
 
 Four different solutions 
 
 The four most essential lifestyle changes for adults who want to lose weight are as follows: 
 
 1. Make sure the only food on the kitchen counter is a fruit bowl 
 
 One of Wansink’s recent “in-home” studies shows that having potato chips visible in the kitchen can add eight more pounds to a woman’s frame than to another woman who didn’t. Women who kept a box of cereal out on the counter weighed 21 lbs. more than those who didn’t. Women who kept a fruit bowl out instead, however, weighed 8 lbs. less than women who did not. 
 
 2. At restaurants, order half-size entrees and use the “Rule of Two” 
 
 For the Restaurant Indulger, Wansink says, “Use our restaurant ‘Rule of Two:’ Order a reasonable entrée that sounds good to you, and choose only two other items to go with it. It can be an appetizer and a glass of wine, a bread roll and a dessert, two bread rolls, etc. This will lead you to choose the two items you want the most without feeling deprived.” Do this, and you’ll eat 21-23% fewer calories, Wansink’s findings show. 
 
 3. In the grocery store, fill the front of your cart with fruits and veggies 
 
 It’s the “we eat what we see” theory in action. Also, chew gum. Shoppers who kept their mouths busy with sugarless gum while shopping bought 7% less junk food, Wansink and his colleagues found in another study. 
 
 4. If you work outside the house, commit to not eating at your desk 
 
 Ask your workplace to help you by offering healthful choices and free fruit in break rooms or cafeterias. Also, pay with cash. Wansink reports that people who pay with cash at work buy fewer sodas and desserts. 
 
 The main idea behind Slim by Design, Wansink says, is to empower readers to create a bigger movement across the nation by identifying “booby-trap” hotspots: restaurants, workplaces and stores, then tweeting, Facebook posting, emailing or mailing their requests for healthful changes directly to those venues. While it may seem too good to be true that corporations and workplaces will listen, Wansink says they will because it’s in their interest in the bottom-line. 
 
 “A grocery store chain may not want to listen to government,” Wansink explains. “But it does need to listen to a person spending $5000 a year in one of its stores. If not, it’s going to be losing a lot of money.” 
 
 Follow Michele on Twitter @MicheleBRaphael. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
– 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.")