What cues do you need to change when it comes to food?

In the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, in Chicago at one of the theaters the 1:05 pm show with every ticket bought you got a free bucket of popcorn and a free drink.  Some people where given large buckets of popcorn and some medium.  As it was the 1:05pm show most people had just had lunch. 

The catch to this exercise was that the popcorn was not fresh it was five days old, so it was so stale.  During the movie, people would eat a couple of bites, put the bucket down and later pick it up again a few minutes later.  It might not have been good enough to eat all at once, but they couldn't leave it alone.  After the movie ended everyone got a short survey to complete.  Once the buckets were weighed it was discovered that on average people with the large bucket of popcorn ate on average 173 more calories of popcorn (equivalent of 21 more dips into the bucket).   The popcorn studies were run in a number of places and each time showed similar results.  

Through these studies a few things became clear, people eat more when given larger containers, it did not matter if popcorn was not fresh or if they had just eaten.  Did people eat because they liked the popcorn? No.  Did they eat because they were hungry? No.  They ate because of the cues around them - this of course was a movie and that's what you do at movies eat popcorn.  They also realised that people also ate because they heard others eating the popcorn, they found that people ate more because of the distracting movie they did not focus on what they ate.  Brain says that simply thinking that a meal will taste good can lead you to eat more.

This got me thinking how many every day cues do we have that make us eat certain foods.  Just this morning after taking my dogs for a walk I watched as my spaniel is so conditioned now that after a walk I will give him a treat from a particular cupboard, so as I walked in Max ran straight for the cupboard.  We do so much of our daily routine out of cues and habit, so if we need to lose weight or want to correct what we eat we need to start changing the cues.