Eating is not a sport - Willpower Is For Fat People

Who ever decided eating was a sport? Seriously, I’d like to know so I can kick him in the junk once for every time I had to buy new jeans because my old ones didn’t fit any more.

Don’t worry, I’m not trying to blame my spare tire on the fact that other people like to eat three pounds of chicken and waffles by themselves. I’m a big boy, I take responsibility for stuffing my own face way too often. And as much as I believe competitive eating supports a culture of over-eating, I don’t have any proof of it.

What I have seen proof of, though, is that people are susceptible to environmental cues about how much to eat, and these cues are being tweaked to make us eat more.

Have you seen the size of the plates lately?

That dish in the picture up top looks like it’s probably 16 inches, maybe more. That’s not supposed to be a dish for one person, it’s a serving platter. You’re supposed to put the whole chicken on it to bring it to the table for a family.

But at restaurants the plates keep getting bigger and bigger. And it’s not just at restaurants. When Alex Bogusky bought a 1940s house, he “discovered the old kitchen cabinets wouldn’t fit his dinner plates. So he did some research and found out that in the past 30 years, plates have gone from 8.5 inches in diameter to 12 inches.”

After buying himself some smaller plates, he noticed he started losing weight. Then he wrote The 9-Inch Diet, which describes his dead-simple plan:

It doesn’t matter what you eat, just eat 9 inches of it â€” not 12.

“The food is horrible, but you get as much as you want”

You might think the size of the plate shouldn’t matter; you eat the same amount regardless. And you’re right, it shouldn’t matter.

Except that we’re talking about these pesky human things, which don’t have a good record for acting logically. Ever seen a political rally?

Brian Wasnik spent years studying why we eat more than we think, and published his findings in Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. One of his studies — my favorite one — was Bad Popcorn in Big Buckets.

158 moviegoers in Philadelphia (57.6% male; 28.7 years) were randomly given a medium (120 g) or a large (240 g) container of free popcorn that was either fresh or stale (14 days old). Following the movie, consumption measures were taken, along with measures of perceived taste.

OUTCOME MEASURES AND RESULTS: Moviegoers who were given fresh popcorn ate 45.3% more popcorn when it was given to them in large containers. This container-size influence is so powerful that even when the popcorn was disliked, people still ate 33.6% more popcorn when eating from a large container than from a medium-size container.

The summary doesn’t report on the perceived taste, but I’ll bet the people with big buckets told themselves it was pretty good. Otherwise they wouldn’t have eaten it.

[Interesting note: Unless you’re planning on getting the free refill, don’t bother getting the large size. According to a 2009 study, “The large size looks bigger, thanks to its titanic tub, but it costs a dollar more and comes with a free refill.” And yes, it’s the same size as the medium.]

Stop eating off of serving platters

I said in a recent article that most people could probably benefit from cutting out snacking, but some of us already aren’t snacking. Some of us are just eating too damn much. Scratch that, most of us are probably eating too much.

Forty years ago, when we used smaller plates, we ate less. And we weren’t as fat. Coincidence? Of course not.

And if that were all that has changed, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Unfortunately what we eat has changed, too. But before I get to that in the next article, you should get some 9-inch plates. Don’t worry that they’re called “luncheon plates”, you can use them for dinner. I won’t tell anyone.

I switched to smaller plates over a year ago and yes, it really does make a difference. Keep this in mind when I post the next article and tell you what I’m putting on these single-serving-size plates.