Slimming: Small Plates Make for Svelte Figures

Here’s a useful tip for slimmers. Anyone struggling to win the battle of the bulge should realise that most of the food they eat isn’t fattening – and that includes burghers, French fries and chocolate biscuits. Suppose you need to consume 2,500 calories a day to keep yourself in energy balance. Everything you eat up to that point can’t possibly make you fat. The love handles only start to grow the moment you exceed that limit. The problem today is that the food and advertising industries are ganging up to make us eat more than we need. And they’re succeeding, much to the detriment of our health. We’re now eating larger portion sizes than ever before. Researchers studied fifty-two paintings of the Last Supper, created over the past thousand years, and found that the size of the food piled on the disciples’ plates had increased by more than two-thirds during this time. We haven’t noticed this change because it’s taken place so slowly. We’ve been encouraged to focus our attention on the quality of the food we consume, rather than its quantity.

One thing is certain, you can’t be fit and fat. Anyone carrying twenty pounds of excess flab is likely to consume fourteen per cent more energy heaving their bodies from place to place. This makes them tired and inefficient. With the exception of long-distance swimmers, whose weight is borne by the water, it’s true to say that fat folk fade fast. Athletes run in the skimpiest of footwear because they know they can make a one per cent saving in energy use for every three-and-a-half ounces they pare from the weight of their shoes.  There are many ways of keeping slim, and it makes life easier if they’re employed in combination, remembering always that eating is meant to be fun. It’s a pleasure to be enjoyed, rather than a process to be analysed and endured.

Some years ago a dietician came up with a novel approach to calorie controlled dieting. She estimated that the average patient coming to her for slimming advice was one-eighth overweight. So she suggested that they should curb their energy intake by dividing their food into eight sections.  Seven of the portions they could eat, and the last they were advised to throw away. Her argument was that it was better for food to go to waste than that go to waist. This scheme would certainly work, but it’s extravagant and not easy to follow. If food has eye appeal, the temptation is to eat it, if only as a compliment to the chef. Besides many of the older generation were trained to clean their plates of every scrap of food, being brought up on the principle of ‘waste not, want not’. As children we were taught to show our gratitude by eating every morsel of food the good Lord gave us, a blessing denied to multitudes of children in Third World countries. Since my mother was a good cook, I found this discipline easy to follow, although I could never quite fathom why finishing my cabbage would aid the starving in Bangladesh.

A far simpler way to control food intake is to make use of a smaller plate, rather than go to the trouble of tipping an eighth of every plateful into the garbage bin or compost heap. The effectiveness of this technique has recently been confirmed by a series of experiments carried out by Dr Brian Wansink, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Cornell University. He offered moviegoers a free supply of popcorn in containers of three different sizes, and found that they ate forty-five per cent more when the containers were large rather than standard size or small. This even applied when the popcorn was stale and unappetizing, when the grazers were still tempted to eat a third more from the larger containers. This phenomenon is now known as the ‘portion size effect’. If you need to reduce your calorie intake, take advantage of this physiological quirk, and serve your food on a smaller plate.

© Donald Norfolk 2010

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