Given the rising average portion sizes, a self-described food enthusiast decided to cut back on his meals by two-thirds.
As it happens, size does matter. I concluded that, like many breakthroughs, it becomes strikingly evident when you think about it after a month of a straightforward experiment with portion sizes: eating what I regularly eat, but in fewer amounts. Specifically, how much depends on how you consume. Every decision you make about the amount of food you eat is influenced by what you are doing while eating, including what you are thinking about, who you are with, where you are, and how long it takes. The fact that I shed 10 pounds in 28 days without exerting any effort is only half the tale.
Overeating: Why Does It Happen?
I overeat for a variety of reasons. The simplest is that I enjoy cooking a lot, so making, sharing, and consuming enormous amounts of food comes easily to me. Our palates have become accustomed to eating food that is rich in flavor—strongly flavorful cuisines from all over the world that overwhelm us with copious amounts of fatty meats that are severely seasoned and spiced. The straightforward, regional dishes that Baby Boomers were accustomed to from the 1950s through the 1970s are very different from these.
The food I consume now would have looked like pure fantasy in the early 1980s, so I’m sure that part of the reason I adore rich cuisine is because I remember the antithesis that came with those difficult times. I decided to pull back and concentrate on quantity rather than a diet that was biased toward any one objective after years of accomplishing little to reduce my weight.
The Rise of Large Portion Sizes
According to author and nutritionist Jenna Hope, “portion sizes have become a problem both inside and outside the home.” “Portions in restaurants are much larger than they used to be, and they are frequently larger when we buy meals to go. Much of that serves as justification for price increases. Our plate sizes are also increasing within the house. The average plate size today differs significantly from that in the 1970s.”
How to Measure Your Food the Easy Way
The beginning of this experiment was not exactly scientific. I knew I was eating too much, not just by my weight, but by the sluggishness I was experiencing and the lack of sleep I was getting. I resolved to eat everything in smaller quantities, reducing evening meals by two-thirds so that as my family tucked into gut-busting portions of pasta, casseroles, Sunday roast, or ramen, I transferred my model-town versions of these meals into a small bowl. It was the opposite of Alan Partridge’s “big plate” used for getting more from the all-you-can-eat breakfast at the Linton Travel Tavern.
“A useful way of measuring portions is based on different parts of your hand: a protein or carbohydrate source should be the size of your palm,” says Hope. “Vegetables should be two cups of your hand; healthy fats should be the size of a thumb.”
I did not heed the advice to eat more vegetables (one challenge at a time). I was okay with fruit, which I ate more of as a way of avoiding the dreaded crisps, but there are always ways to improve. I was starting from a bad place at just over 18 stone. I am what you might call “thick set” so it’s not all blubber. I once interviewed Henri Chenot, the French spa and wellness guru, and he told me that the result of the scan his staff conducted on me in his Alpine retreat revealed that I had, in his words, “the densest bones he had ever seen.” That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Satisfying vs. Feeling ‘Full’
The most important thing about getting started was establishing a routine and normalizing eating less. Of course, there were times when I felt hungry and once or twice it felt pretty desperate, but after a week, you become used to it and the sense of waiting for satisfaction, or anticipating “fullness,” dissipates.
“The GLP-1 and Leptin hormones [that control feelings of satiation and appetite] and Ghrelin [which controls feelings of hunger] will interact,” explains Hope. “If you get used to bigger portions your Ghrelin levels will increase, so that until you eat the larger portions you’ll be feeling hungry. In response to that, your GLP-1 and Leptin will decrease and that will drive you to eat more food.
“Breakfast is the anomaly because in the UK we tend to eat too little or skip it completely. That makes people hungrier during the day and can cause them to overeat later.” The Government’s guidance echoes this.
The Psychology of Portion Control
It was soon obvious how your mind works along with your gut to adjust in a startlingly quick manner. “Eating large portions regularly is ‘mindless’ eating – as opposed to ‘mindful’ eating,” says Dr Susan Albers, a psychologist and author from the Cleveland Clinic in the US. “People are acting out of habit. They are reacting to external factors. If we listen to what’s inside – our internal hunger cues – we would sense we are overeating. But when we respond mindlessly to portion size we overeat.”
The Importance of Mindful Eating
Eating too much is so often linked not just to emotional states such as anxiety or even boredom, but to “how” we eat. In other words, when we eat we should be conscious that we are “eating” and not consuming food while we are working, or watching TV, or scrolling through social media. This is what Albers classifies as “mindless” – not stupid, but unconscious. Mindless eating leads to bigger portions and lends itself to eating food of little nutritional value because we associate it with convenience, hits of salt and sugar, and satisfying our emotional needs.
“Conscious eating is about making choices,” says Albers. “It’s not controlled eating – 75 percent of our eating is related to emotion more than hunger. Eating large portions is a way to self-soothe rather than to nourish.”
How Culture Encourages Overeating
As well as psychology and biology, there is culture. Gen Xers such as myself are the children of Boomers, who were in turn the children of the War generation, so the idea of not wasting food has been passed down for decades. This made a lot of sense in a world during and after rationing, on plates containing almost no processed food, and when most people took more exercise as a matter of course.
But “finishing your plate” has quite a different impact when the plates are loaded with fried chicken (not even I eat food that comes in a bucket), lamb dhansak with three sides and naan bread, or some dreadful industrialized pizza with cheese in the crust. You never hear anyone say: “I overdid it with the broccoli last night.”
The Social Media Influence on Eating Habits
“One of the things that can be useful is to get comfortable with the idea of wasting food,” says Hope. “I appreciate that would not go down well with a lot of people, particularly in a cost of living crisis. Eating excessive food is only going to be wasted inside you as it will leave you feeling uncomfortable and eating food you don’t want or need will affect your weight and health. Ultimately, putting less on your plate means less waste.”
As well as old cultural traditions, we face new ones in the sheer volume of food content on Instagram and TikTok, the great majority of which concerns tyrannosaurus-size portions, dripping with fat in the most calculatedly salacious way. Watching a food blogger tuck into a triple-smash burger or a platter of barbecue wings and ribs smothered in sugary sauce is an immediate appetite accelerant. Social media promotes the cult of overeating.
The Unexpected Benefits of Eating Smaller Portions
By the third week, it was obvious that I was losing weight by the relaxed nature of the belt around my waist. But the more startling consequence of my efforts was the almost immediate improvement in my sleep. After a much smaller evening meal with no snacks, I slept more deeply with far fewer interruptions than before.
“If you are eating a large portion of a heavy food then that’s going to put a lot of pressure on your digestive system, which will be focused on breaking down that food rather than starting to secrete the sleep hormones that come from the gut,” says Hope. “It also works the other way around: if you haven’t had enough sleep you are much more likely to eat more.”
The Power of Smaller Portions
Naturally, I felt less hungry when I didn’t overindulge, which meant that the temptation to attack snacks was greatly reduced. When I did slip back to the “old normal” – which I did on a few days at various weekends during this month – I felt fuller much quicker, as if the effort I had put in during the week was acting as a natural Ozempic.
So I lost 10lb in four weeks, and I’m hoping that this should set me up to lose a whole lot more. A home cholesterol kit showed a steep fall (it would be advisable to have this checked by your GP to be sure you’re making genuine progress), so that was another plus point. The past month hasn’t been about dieting at all. It’s been a kind of casual retraining. I don’t need half as much food as I was eating to get by happily, and that extra half was doing all sorts of mischief.