A fascinating new study has shown that if you are trying to keep in trim and lose weight you are more probable to fall off the bandwagon and eat unhealthily if you go to restaurants where the waiters are overweight or obese. Another interesting finding was that normal weight individuals who were not looking out for their diet were more likely to eat healthily when they saw the overweight waiting staff.
The research which was done by three American universities namely University of British Columbia, the University of Arizona and Duke University. This research which was deliberately designed to see how people in restaurants were affected by the weight of the waiters serving them will be of great interest to fast food companies and other restaurants around the world.
The study team even made use of student volunteers wearing special body suits which could make them look very overweight in order to correlate their research.
In particular they noted that when one particular normal weight waitress went to take food orders she would come back with less food than when she was asked to wear the special suit which put her up to Size 16.
We have reported at Ukmedix News previously on the power of peer pressure to influence how much you eat but we were unaware that it extended to waiting staff too. This research should make you stop and think and examine who and what are influencing you to eat healthily or unhealthily.
If you are of a normal weight maybe you should stick to that restaurant where the staff are overweight to remind you what you will appear like if you eat unhealthily, and if you are on a diet make sure you any hang out at restaurants with skinny staff!
Story from the ukMedix News.
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6 comments:
Funnily enough I don't run into that many overweight waiters - I guess there are a few here and there, but it is such a fast paced job with some interesting weight control habits attached to it you usually don't have heavier wait staff.
Now the kitchen staff on the other hand...lol
Just had to point out that UBC's not an American school =] If it were, quite a few of my friends would be very happy.
Finally, someone else to blame for that extra milk-shake!
UBC = Canadian.
NOT American.
This is not that surprising but it's intriguing as well.
You might eat less if you had the mistaken belief that you might have a shot with the attractive server.
And let it all hang out if you had no reason to ask your server what time they're getting off work.
What is the equilibrium point for restaurant owners?
Does the perception of the server as a sexual competitor or conquest influence the selection of the meal and the amount of revenue?
I don't know how to answer that question.
Looks like the market has already sorted it out anyway.
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Being in banquets for so many years I've run into this big problem now that I have to eat lunch at the same time as other people eat lunch.
I'm not hungry at lunch time.
For many years I ate a late breakfast before lunch, which was actually lunch when I didn't eat breakfast after four hours of work.
Or I ate lunch at two or three in the afternoon after I had served out lunch to the meetings and put out all the fires that happen over the lunch hour.
And many times I subsisted on just picking things off trays before the food went out.
I called it quality control.
And it might have been a cheat but I did catch a few things from becoming problems by eating that way.
Now, when I go out to lunch I have to order this gargantuan lunchtime portion that other people have been used to eating for years.
I'm not built for it.
I was trained for constant opportunistic sampling of things going out or coming back.
I'm really having trouble switching gears even after two years in.
There were times when I had a food account that I would go whole hog and order a huge steak.
And polish the whole thing off.
But not very often.
I took more meals home to my wife than I ate myself.
I had the most underused food account in the place.
But that was helped by the fact that the food account was also a taxable benefit.
And sometimes I would order extra things like a sampler platter or pizza for my staff and put it on my food account.
I'd get shit for it, too.
I had the lowest food account expense of all the managers.
So, I wriggled off that hook.
How can you give me shit for using my underused food account that I have to pay tax on to treat our staff to something different on a difficult night?
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