There’s a new way to help you reach your New Year’s diet resolution: the HAPIfork. It’s is a fork that will light up and vibrate if you attempt to take more than one bite every 10 seconds. Now that’s portion control.
The idea is that if you’re more conscious of how quickly you eat, you will slow down and be less likely to overeat. Hapilabs, the makers of the $100 HAPIfork, say that the device will make well-proportioned meals last twenty minutes.
Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern said in her review of the HAPIfork:
During setup, the fork asked me to identify my eating style. Was I a “picker” or a “scooper”? The fork is supposed to use this to recognize movements, but I still had to move the fork to my mouth in very specific way for it to recognize each bite. When I used the tines to stab chicken and broccoli, it registered all my bites, but almost none of my scoops of rice were counted.
While eating I kept one eye on the app’s countdown on my phone. “Great timing!” it blinked when I separated bites by more than 10 seconds.
Hmm…so scoops are the key to circumventing the wrath of the HAPIfork? Sounds like they may have a problem there. A blinking and vibrating fork sounds like a cruel and unusual way to enforce a diet anyway.