Sigh... The kids have finally gone to bed. Click! Feet up, television on. Rustle, crunch, crunch… Bowl of crisps on the arm rest. Pop! Glug, glug… A glass of much-deserved ‘liquid refreshment’ in hand. It sounds like the end of long, hard day. Psychologist and researcher Brian Wansink thinks that such times of unthinking crunching and glugging are the reason so many weight loss diets fail. The struggle to lead a healthy life has less to do with will power, he says, and more to do with the layout of our homes.

Spending many weeks measuring, photographing and analysing the homes of hundreds of families, Wansink looked for the differences between the homes of overweight individuals and healthy weight individuals. Some of his findings are startling and, given that at least quarter of all adults are trying to lose weight right now, it is worth listening to what he has to say.

He found that seemingly unimportant choices can have a weighty effect on what goes in our mouth; where we stow the cereal, how much clutter we leave on the kitchen counter and even the colour of our crockery can all play their part. The size of our dinner plates, for example, greatly affects how much we eat. Using a smaller plate (10 inch vs. 12 inch) results in eating a fifth less food – but feeling just as satisfied as after having eaten a larger portion. Eating from a dark plate when a meal has a light-coloured sauce also causes us to eat less, as does eating a dark or tomato-based meal from a white plate. When the plate colour contrasts the colour of the food, we subconsciously see the food better and so naturally eat more sensibly. For similar reasons, wine aficionados would do well to drink red plonk instead of white: we tend to pour about 10% more white wine than red because it is harder to see the pale liquid and so more difficult to judge.

Wansink suggests that making small adjustments to our kitchen could have huge effects on our clothes’ size. The kitchens of overweight people are more likely to have messy worktops; women who keep crisps on the counter typically weigh 3.6 kg (8 pounds) more than their neighbours who do not. And more alarmingly, women who keep a ‘healthy’ box of cereal visible anywhere in the kitchen are, on average, a trouser-busting 9.5 kg (1st 7lb) heavier. Wansink thinks that the pictures of skinny, smiling models tricks our minds into thinking we should eat more.

He offers us all a variety of simple tricks to help resist unhealthy temptations: only keep a fruit bowl out on the kitchen counter, serve food from the hob rather than the kitchen table, place prepared fruit and veg on the middle shelf of the fridge and – importantly for snack lovers – keep treats in a difficult to reach cupboard. If we heed his advice then, just maybe, the next time there’s a crunch, crunch, crunch, it will be the sound of carrot sticks and not crisps. Sadly, Wansink offers no advice on how to make carrots taste as good as crisps.