Bigger Portion Sizes Make You Eat More
RESEARCH FINDING: A portion of food twice as big as what you normally consume will lead you to eat about a third more food than usual. And funnily, larger portions lead to greater consumption even across conditions of bad food.
Interestingly, portion sizes have been growing for a millennia. An analysis of 52 paintings of “The Last Supper” shows the painted portions of bread and wine have been steadily getting bigger over the last 1,000 years.
TAKEAWAY:
· The best way to not eat more than necessary is to control your portion sizes, and don’t let them control you.
· The second step is to train children to listen to internal cues and not be misled by external cues.
· The third step is to have food marketers limit portion sizes. Increasing portion size makes an offering more attractive, but when everyone does this in order to be competitive, all available offerings become large. This leads to unnecessarily large portions and unnecessarily large people.
· Step 4: Choose smaller size cutlery and plates on the dinner table
· Step 5: Never shop with a hungry stomach. If you go to a super market, and end up buying a lot of unwanted food, try taking a hand basket instead of a cart. (Ever noticed why the cart sizes are so huge now a days? They encourage you sublimely to buy more)
· Step 6: When eating in a restaurant, ask for the take out box before you start to dig in. Transfer part of your food to your take out box and eat only what you decide to. Seeing less on plate will motivate you to finish what you eat and also enhance your satiety.
· So make your portions smaller. You’ll save some money and save your waistline.
