Trick yourself healthy with Graze.com

 

Mike reviewed new UK styartup Graze.com over at TechCrunch a few days ago, and since people in the office were talking about it too I signed up to see if it was any good.

Product review first - I got some nice, fresh grapes and some tasty dried fruit in a box. For £2.29, I'm happy.

Two things are notably clever about the Graze.com concept. First is the Pandora-style reviews and preferences system, which lets you tell the website what you like and want more of. Like Pandora, I don't expect Graze to send me anything I don't like twice, so long as I can be bothered to tell it what I've enjoyed. That's a good and useful feedback system.

The other clever thing about Graze is the psychological trick it lets you play on yourself. I've written before about the decision-making theory, laid out in more detail in Tim Harford's Logic of Life, which posits that the decisions we make are the outcome of an internal wrangle between two parts of our brains - one, the dopamine system, concerned with immediate gratification, the other, the cognitive system, concerned with long-term planning. The theory has been tested extensively - for example, "in one, the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: 'I'll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?' Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit."

Graze.com gives you the chance to decide today what you're going to eat tomorrow. That's a very valuable aid to your decision-making process, because you're letting your (wise) cognitive system order you some fruit, long before your (greedy, stupid) dopamine system decides you should be stuffing down Mars bars. While I still can't quite force myself to exercise tomorrow by deciding to do so today, having a  Graze box turn up on my desk pretty much guarantees I'll be snacking on fruit and not chocolate. What I'm really paying for is to have the decision about what to eat taken out of the hands of a future me that both theory and experience tells me can't be trusted with that decision. And that's £2.29 well spent.