I'll admit it: My daughter's nearly two, and I never quite lost my post-pregnancy baby weight. In fact, come to think of it, the only time I was ever truly happy with my weight was around the time I got married. Talking to many of my friends, I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Most of us struggle with our weight for most of our lives, depriving ourselves in diets, attempting exercise regimes, but still being unable to resist that one last cookie in the jar, or taking a few more nibbles from our plates, even though we're full.

I just read an interesting book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. (Bantam Dell, 2007), that offers a number of clues as to why we Americans seem to be gradually packing on the pounds... sometimes without even realizing our bad habits.

Wansink has made a career out of studying food and consumer behavior, and is the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His job often involves staging fun experiments that involve things like rigging up "bottomless" bowls of soup to see how much people will eat if they never see their bowl nearing empty, or measuring the number of M&Ms people will eat if they're all the same color, as opposed to multiple colors. (You can read more about some of his experiments on his Web site.)

Along the way, he's made a number of discoveries about peoples' behavior when faced with food. Some of them are obvious no-brainers, but his experiments show that even people who are aware of overeating pratfalls are not always able to resist temptation.

For instance, Wansink says that we rely on external cues to determine when we should stop eating. For instance, in the aforementioned bottomless soup bowl experiment, Wansink discovered that people who were eating soup out of normal bowls ate around 9 ounces of soup, while those whose bowls were continuously (and secretly) replenished just kept eating, typically consuming about 15 ounces of soup.

Similarly, Wansink points out that pouring a bowl of cereal from a larger package (such as the warehouse-store jumbo boxes) or eating dinner on an oversized plate, can cause you to eat more, because these larger sizes distort your conception of a proper portion size.

Dining with friends presents further overeating dangers. "What we don't always realize is how strongly our family and friends influence what we eat," writes Wansink, because the we are less aware of how much we're eating, and we often pace our eating with other diners. He cites a study that found that you'll eat an average of 35 percent more if you're dining with another person than if you were alone, and if you're eating with a group of seven or more people, you'll eat nearly twice as much than you would if you were alone.

While I'm not going to cloister myself alone at mealtimes, and eat only out of single-serving packages, Wansink's book made me more aware of some of the eating traps that are all too easy to fall into. His philosophy is that you can make small, relatively painless changes in your diet and your food habits that will enable you to lose 10 to 20 pounds a year.

No depravation, no points to count? It's worth a try.