Downsize Dishes to Shrink Your Belly (or Butt!)

Plate sizes have grown in the past 20 years and so have our bellies! Have you ever taken a look at your grandmother’s china dinner plate? It kind of looks like a salad plate. Sad … but we have gotten used to oversized plates, glasses and bowls. The problem is that larger plates leads to larger portions of food!

Smaller plates = weight loss
Numerous studies have found that that people serve and eat more food from larger plates and bowls. Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, has spent his career determining the hidden cues that make us eat. His studies have found that if you can shrink your plate and bowl size, you can cut out 100-200 calories a day. This translates into a 10-20 pound weight loss a year.

Specifically, here is what one of his tests found: A two inch difference in plate diameter — from 12″ to 10″ plates — would result in 22% fewer calories being served. If a typical dinner has 800 calories, a smaller plate would lead to a weight loss of around 18 pounds per year for an average size adult. And here is the best part – the people in his studies felt no hunger or didn’t even realize that their food portions were being decreased by the smaller plates!  (pic is of Dr. Wansink and myself at an NYU lecture).

Check these sites out
For those of you who want to find out more about the hidden cues that drive people to eat, I would recommend that you check out Dr. Wansink’s book: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. In addition, check out the Small Plate Movement™   The movement includes a collective weight loss goal, entitled the Small Plate Challenge. It will challenge participants to eat off of a 10″ plate for their largest meal of each day for one month. The Challenge officially launched on January 1, 2009, but can be incorporated at any time. During the period that you challenge yourself, we will also track other changes participants’ make in their lives, e.g. incorporating more vegetables in their diet or discussing the Challenge with co-workers. Small plate movement hopes to have 10 million people joined by Jan 2010.

So I would challenge city girls and guys who are trying to lose weight to buy smaller plates and bowls. You won’t even realize that you are eating less food! Before you know it, you should see the scale start to drop!