Dinner service - obesity

it was a running joke that she was supposedly very fat (joking about her breaking chairs, toilets etc.) although she wasn't.

She certainly wasn't in that pic of her in bra & trousers!

Maybe she sometimes wore padding or her weight fluctuated in the series?

Articles and magazines often encourage readers to use smaller plates for weight management. Salad plates are often recommended. Which probably helps unless you go back for more. They also suggest that people immediately brush their teeth after eating to prevent eating again. I personally find this silly. If I really feel like eating something, say, before bed, the horror of having to brush my teeth again is not going to stop me.

They dressed Anna Karen in frumpy clothing and thick-rimmed glasses, with an uninspiring hairstyle and it was a running joke that she was supposedly very fat (joking about her breaking chairs, toilets etc.) although she wasn't.

She also used her acting skills to appear unattractive, frowning, hunching her shoulders and so on. She was made up to look pasty-faced and unmade-up.

Out of costume, she was an attractive woman.

Modern large plates are to enhance presentation I think. If that is your style of serving

I thought it was that Olive in OTB was dowdy/unattractive?

Indeed, and before her On The Buses days she worked as a stripper believe it or not!

I’ve lost 30kgs over the last two years and part of my approach to it was eating from a smaller plate, and if eating out I’d only eat half of what I was served.

It's not just just dinner plates that have got bigger Cereal.boels are enormous nowadays . The serving size on the box looks lost at the bottom.of the bowl.
And 'lips' at the edges of plates and bowls to set aside bones and fruit stones etc have disappeared from many designs. I remember quite small dessert bowls with plum crumble and custard where we put the plum stones around the edge lip, Tinker tailed solder sailor.

Thanks for the explanation.

TDEE is total daily enegy expenditure - it's the number of calories that they calculate you need per day based on your level of physical activity. So the estimation I was given is quite high because I am very physically active.

OMAD is One Meal A Day - I eat once a day in the evening because it fits in with my daily life. I'm not a big eater but I can't go to bed hungry!

Sometimes the portion sizes I make are quite small so I give dh the small plate to stop him feeling hard done by

Where are you getting your small plates, I had some from a charity shop but have only one left

Olive wasnt fat by any standards. In the film when at the holiday camp, she was in a bikini in the pool and and was revealed to have a very svelte figure 😊

It was a running joke that Olive from On the Buses was hugely fat - she certainly wasn't by modern standards

Just be wary with vintage crockery. The glazes and transfers can contain lead and other heavy metals like cadmium.

Yeah my brother and sister are those people. Both bigger eaters, both physically smaller than I am.

Metabolisms etc, sadly!

Greed is really just eating more than you should, and it’ll differ by your own body. One person’s greed is another person’s appetite.

My body is so against me that smaller plates aren’t really of much help!

I use my grandmother's plates from the 50s/60s. There's a load of plates which are the same size as modern plates and another load which are a smaller size. We use the smaller size day to day. Partly yes because I don't want us to eat more than we need to!

true
i was referring more to those who claim they eat plenty but are thin, or whatever

Yes, l remember all this. We always ate well as my Mum was a much better cook than I am. Stew and dumplings, toad-in-the-hole, Shepherd's/Cottage pies, meat pies, roasts on Sundays as well as homemade chips with sausages, bacon or fish. We always had a pudding, too. If we had already eaten a school dinner, we would have something like beans or spaghetti on toast followed by homemade biscuits. We drank milk or tea and sometimes orange or blackcurrant squash. Fizzy drinks were a very rare treat and l don't like them much. think this was fairly standard in the seventies in many British families.

For the smaller plates thing, on the one hand, I don't really 'get' it. A portion of food, when weighed and portioned correctly is the same regardless of the plate.

Fine dining often uses huge plates and wealthier/upper class people do not tend toward being overweight despite this. A psychological trick wouldnt work on me, I'd know the plate was smaller as I am an adult and would've picked it myself. I would also likely just put food vertical rather than horizontal!

Nobody is arguing that eating too much and human physiology don’t matter. Of course eating more leads to weight gain - everyone knows that! The problem is pretending that this makes the causes of obesity purely a matter of individual willpower.

Biology matters enormously. People differ in genetics, appetite regulation, satiety signalling, metabolism, hormonal responses and susceptibility to our food environmental. The same food, stressor, lack of sleep or sedentary environment can produce very different physiological and behavioural responses in different people. Two people can therefore be exposed to the same triggers without having the same level of hunger, cravings, energy expenditure or tendency to gain weight.

You can take responsibility for your own weight while also recognising that biology and the food environment influence how difficult that is for different people. Both things can be true.

Yes dietitians often recommend using smaller plates when trying to lose weight. It’s a psychological trick and bigger plates are associated with greater caloric intake.

Also, plates don’t have to be full. Try going by weight not looks. Weigh the portion.

We often had bread and butter with meals but that was to bulk the meal out in case the portion we were given was not large enough to meet our appetites.

We also have deliberately bought smaller plates (DMIL born in 1945 is the one who complains bizzarely) also serve the left overs box first a tip I picked up on here- then it is harder to over eat.

Agreed, not my experience either. I was born early 80s but I remember a lot of fat people within my friend's parents and at school when I was very young. Some very obese. My ex's Mum (and ex was 8 years older than me) was very obese, to the point she had rubber tyres on the bike she used to take ex and siblings to school as she was too fat for a normal bike. She was born in the late 30s.

Apparently a portion of fish and chips from the chippie is twice the size it was in the 1970s