Use the power of BURNING SHAME to lose weight fast! You’ll be in shape for the summer season in no time. Guaranteed to scar your psyche forever. Dietitians hate it!

The issue:

It’s often hard to keep track of the quantity of snack food that one can eat.

For example, if you eat a single “fun size” candy bar every hour at work (maybe you work somewhere with a collective candy bowl), you’ll accumulate 3200 additional calories over the course of an 8-hour 5-day work week (at ~80 calories per “fun-size” bar).

Proposal:

After consuming the contents of a candy wrapper / chip bag / soda can, don’t just throw away the now-empty container: instead, use a pushpin to tack it onto a cork board / bulletin board (Figure 2).

The accumulation of wrappers will give you perspective on how much junk food you are actually consuming.

Fig. 2:  Each participant in this system gets a region of the cork board where they pin their candy wrappers. It could be difficult to attach soda cans with a pushpin, so maybe glue could be used. This would also have the benefit of eventually turning the entire cork board to eventually become some sort of horrified piece of contemporary art. Chocolate at left is not to scale. Or at least it shouldn’t be. If you’re going to buy that much chocolate, at least buy some better chocolate.

Bonus option:

Don’t wash the wrappers: this way, they will attract rats, pigeons, snakes, and other vermin, which will invade your kitchen and start eating your snacks. Counterintuitively, these vermin are actually doing you a favor by eating the snacks before you can!. Involuntary dieting: accomplished!

PROS: Makes you more aware of both your degree of snacking AND your consumption of wasteful packaging products.

CONS: Your new kitchen vermin may possibly give you the bubonic plague. But that can usually be cured these days!