If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight, you know not to eat too much of a good thing. Here’s the trickier challenge: eating too much of a healthy thing.

Most of us tend to believe that “healthy” foods are less filling than unhealthy foods. As a result, a new study has found, people overindulge when they choose a food they consider to be healthy, eating more than the recommended serving size.

While overeating is widely accepted as a major driver of obesity, few of us worry about feasting on a food we think is good for us.

The study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, was published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Food packaging or menus that label certain dishes as ‘healthy’ may be contributing to overeating and weight gain, the study author Jacob Suher suggested.

Researchers in the study used a nutritional scale on the front of food packages to influence participants’ judgment and behavior. When a food was portrayed as healthy, participants ordered bigger portion sizes, consumed greater amounts and reported lower hunger levels after consumption. Even those who explicitly disagreed with the idea that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods were subject to the same biases.

What’s an eater to do? 

• Knowledge is power. Understanding a subconscious bias and keeping it in mind is the first step towards not allowing that bias to rule your actions and decisions.

• Stop using blanket terms like ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ to describe your food. You can’t do anything about food packaging, but the language you use in your home can help improve your habits and those of your family.

• Focus on specific nourishing aspects of the foods you eat. This will help diminish the implicit idea that the food will be less filling, according to the study results. For example, think about choosing carrots because their many vitamins and minerals make them a nutritious snack, not simply because carrots are healthy.

For more tips on how to use behavioral science and psychology to eat better, visit http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/JACR.