Listen to your body, it communicates with you 24/7. It really tells you how much it needs, don't let your conscience tell you "clean your plate". There are a lot of factors, other than food that determine how much we eat. To name a few: if you are served larger portion, if you're having a great variety of foods, if you eat from a larger box, if you are distracted, you're going to eat MORE! Professor Brian Wansink, a prominent researcher of psychology of overeating, from Cornell University conducted a series of fascinating experiments and discovered many worrying eating behaviors. The test subject, 158 movie-goers were given either a medium or large bag of popcorn which was either fresh or stale (14 days old). The stale popcorn eaters consumed 34 % more from a large bag than those who received medium bag, even though they thought the popcorn didn't taste good. Similar experiments involved bags of candy being munched while volunteers were watching television, and bowls of buffet snacks at parties, yielded similar results. One of the strongest psychological motivations to eat more is the need to empty out plates.
Professor Wansink carried out an interesting experiment at the University campus. He set up four bowls at the table. The participant were to try out a new recipe for tomato soup and also that they could eat all they wanted. Two participants, unbeknownst to them, were eating from "bottomless bowls". Those bowls were rigged with a device that allowed the research team to refill it very slowly. The results were astonishing! On average, those participants who were eating from bottomless bowls ate 73 percent more soup than the others. You're probably quite surprised, aren't you? ;-)
Here are some tips how to eat less:
- Keep track of what you've already eaten.
- Since portion size determines how much we eat, it's not always best to go large. You might be getting better value for the money but at the end you're going to pay bigger price for "going large".
Remember 80/20 rule, eat until you're satisfied NOT until you're stuffed! :-)