Can you lose weight with a smaller plate?
So portion control is clearly critical to losing weight and eating healthy. There’s study after study to show how well this can work for you. The natural extension of this might be not just the portion size of your food, but also the size of your plate. A lot of research has gone into this very question: does it make a difference whether you use a small or a large plate in how much you actually eat? The answer is yes, for adults, but not so much for kids.
Many studies of kids have shown mixed results on whether plate size is
a factor when children serve themselves. For instance, in one study it
didn’t matter how big the plate was or if they served themselves by filling
plates from a buffet, they pretty much ate the same amount of food.
For adults it makes a difference. Possibly our perceptions become more accurate as we get older. Brain Wansink, who creates some of the finest research on our perceptions of food, studied adult nutritionists at a staged ice cream social. The participants were randomly given a large bowl or a small bowl for to use for their ice cream. They were then given a large or a small serving spoon to serve themselves. Afterwards they were questioned about how much ice cream they felt they had served themselves and how much they had eaten.
Those given a larger bowl served themselves about 1/3 more ice cream. When they used the larger serving spoon, they took about 15% more ice cream. By using both a larger bowl and spoon folks served themselves a whopping 45% more than those using the combination of a smaller bowl and smaller serving spoon. Interestingly, only 3 of those at the party didn’t finish their ice cream (and these were nutritionists who should presumably know better).
Having a guide to portion size on the correct sized plate has been shown to help as well. "The Diet Plate" is a right sized dinner plate with outlines of the appropriate portion sizes printed directly on the plate. Researchers used a similar cereal bowl with rings painted on the inside to show serving sizes for cereal.
In a study of obese diabetics the scientists randomized half to use The Diet Plate and bowls. The rest simply followed their usual routine and recommendations from their doctors and dietitians. Over six months of use, the group who used The Diet Plate lost significantly more weight. Not a little bit, either, but the equivalent to a 300-pound man losing up to 17.1 pounds.
It's clear that portion size is critical to weight control, and if using a smaller plate for meals helps you eat the right portion sizes, I am all for it.