Dinner service - obesity

Only a day, but my DH and DC are all strapping, 6'5" rugby players. I'm teeny tiny, of course, so I just need a shaving of lettuce.

I was married in 1989. Our everyday tea/dinner set is Marks and Spencer Harvest, which was one of the most popular patterns in the eighties and nineties. I noticed years ago that the standard size of these plates is definitely smaller than modern plates. The salad plates are the size of today's side plates. I use the side plates for their intended purpose and the salad plates if I am having a smaller meal. When our children were primary school age, they would eat their dinners from the salad plates while we had the dinner plates, as my parents did when I was a child. It has not stopped me struggling with my weight for most of my adult life but has probably helped me not to reach the vast sizes that were fairly rare thirty or forty years ago but, sadly, all too common in people these days, especially far too many younger people. The only thing I find that properly keeps my weight down is intermittent fasting. It is not right for everyone but it suits my metabolism well.

Feed them for how long though!

On Graham Norton lord sugar said the way he kept trim was using a small fork for the same reason you describe. My problem is crisps, fizzy drinks and bread to try to get me through the day so I don’t think either of your methods would work for me but if it works for you go for it!!

It's not just plate size; eating has become a pastime for more than just a few people - any place, any time, anywhere, and any excuse.

Small wine glasses work for us too, I got a set of six from the charity shop. I use them at dinner parties so I don’t look stingy serving half an inch of wine in a massive wine glass.

I eat my meals off the head of a drawing pin. People have lost sight of what a normal meal / healthy body looks like. A head of iceberg lettuce can easily feed a family of 4.

I have also noticed this about plates.

When I first set up my own home (mid-80s) I bought an everyday day dinner set - dinner plates, side plates, bowls, cups and saucers etc. The only thing I now have left are the six dinner plates. More recently, i.e. this century, my crockery has come from the supermarket as they do plain white things that are easy to replace when breakages occur. The modern dinner plates are about one inch bigger than the 1980s plates.

Until recently I also had the plate my DM gave me to take to University. This was a plate we had used at home while I was a child in the 1960s/70s to eat our main meal on. It was approximately the same size as my modern side plates.

I also have a rather lovely vintage tea set that I bought in a second hand shop some time ago. I think it is probably 1930s. The plates are tiny.

I don't know whether plate size is any contributory factor to obesity but when DH and I are on a fast day we usually serve our main meal on the 1980s plates!

Agreed OP. Doctors and weight loss advisers all recommend you use smaller plates to help with portion control as we automatically think space on a plate means a small portion rather than it being just right.

They also recommend using different coloured plates, such as blue.

Those little cakes were called fairy cakes. I still make them for the Gdcs’ birthday parties! Chocolate ones (chocolate buttercream on top with a Smartie) always go down very well.

I have some old cook books from around 1970/71 - one has a pic of a very young Mary Berry in the intro! But I do notice that the quantities for e.g. a sponge cake or a lemon meringue pie would only make 4 pretty small portions. Re the LMP in particular, I just CBA to go to all that faff, making the whole thing from scratch, for such a small pie - I will at least double the quantities.

(Mind you I only make one about once a year, for dh’s birthday)

“I'm always shocked when parents take snacks (junk) for their kids to eat on the way back from school. God forbid they are hungry and have to wait a couple of hours until dinner time!”

I would usually judge this as well but now I have young grandchildren this does happen the one day a week they go to a swimming lesson straight from school and need an energy boost . The other 4 days a week they do go home and have a healthy snack.

I guess they do get judged by anyone who only sees them on a Tuesday!

At the height of my weight loss obsession I ate off my then toddler’s plates! I do think people probably felt satiated for longer as they were eating a lot less processed crap and more filling foods. It was expensive to buy things like chocolate and cakes.

I tend to use slightly smaller dinner plates because the large ones we thought were stylish needed to be hand washed ( I took them to the charity shop )
They didn’t fit in the dishwasher.
None of us are overweight , but to be fair I tend to stop eating before I’m completely full .
I also have massive bowls for noodles + ramen which we occasionally also use for rice based dishes .
It does admittedly look like you don’t have much to eat in the bowl but once you start eating you realise it’s enough.
My mum used to make us clear our plates , felt like we were in trouble back in the 70s 😟 for not finishing our dinners

When I see what I think looks like not enough food on the plate, it nearly always is the right amount. I find it really hard not to give myself more than I can finish. I guess it's a comfort thing. Like knowing there's plenty so you could eat lots if you weren't feeling full? Almost like you trick yourself into thinking you might not get full?

People can blame it on poverty, cost of living etc etc. Bottom line is, you eat too much and do too little, you will gain weight. Human physiology hasn't changed. You can't blame the government or anything else. It is all down to yourself. And I say that as someone carrying more weight than I should be. My own fault.

My siblings and I were allowed an apple or a banana when we came home from school starving.
I doubt the proliferation of fast food outlets helps at all. Having spent a couple of years working in a popular high st bakery I witnessed many a family of very overweight parents with very overweight children buying after school snacks, steak bakes, sausage rolls, donuts, pastries etc, to "put them on till tea time".
Then came Justeat, deliveroo etc so people didn't even have to get off their arses and go and get it!!

I recently noticed that what was a standard sized ice cream cone that both adults used to eat now has a teddy bear on it and is labeled as a toddler cone. The standard ice cream used to be a single scoop and now large wafle cones with 2+ scoops of ice cream are the norm.

Growing up in the 70s, our dinners were big and followed by pudding. However they consisted of a smallish portion of meat of some sort with loads of boiled potatos and veg, with home made cake or fruit and evaporated milk afterwards.
We had one car which my dad drove to work, so my mum and I walked everywhere, a mile to school and back, to the shops, carrying back the bags, then playing out rather than screens.
There was no Macdonalds, KFC, takeaway pizza, fizzy drinks were a rare treat and meals out for birthdays only. Sweets were what could be bought with 50p pocket money a fortnight and when they were gone, they were gone.
Portion sizes have inflated I agree, but obesity is also due to more sedentary lifestyles, time poverty and easy access to high calorie tempting foods.

What a wildly unprovable claim!

What is it with the blanket statements. People are all different. I have cake virtually everyday, as I said in an earlier post. I am not what would be classed as young. I am very slim.

I have used smaller plates for years.

Have also, gradually, put on weight over those years.

It's not the portion size for me. It's all the snacking!

I don’t think it’s so much the size of the plate as what you put on it. The calories can build up quickly. Pasta for example is a healthy choice in itself, it’s what you put on it that determines the calorie content. My DH has type 2 diabetes. Neither of us are significantly overweight but needed to lose a few pounds so I bought two diabetic plates, which portion out the food into protein, veg, carbs etc and we stuck to the instructions for a couple of months. Both of us lost around a stone each without weighing anything out. Not saying it would necessarily work for everyone, but it did for us.

Correct. Slim people would have cake as a desert after a meal (not every day mind) but never between meals. I mean young slim people can do whatever they want but older slim women do not have cake with coffee mid morning or mid afternoon.

My rule of thumb is normal plates/big pasta bowls are for salads or for lean protein and veg - meals where I actively want to volume eat to increase my veg intake. Anything else, I will have it on a child’s plate or in a mug. I can have more if I want, but often I’m actually full after the first small portion and I would have just eaten more because it was there. I’ve lost almost 10 stone this year with no jabs, so it’s working for me!

i have also been trying to find smaller plates
the current plates are just huge