Dinner service - obesity

OP I agree with you. I think a lot of people don’t know what a normal portion is and just eat way too much. Smaller plates would help with that. If foods falling off the edge your portion is too big.

Obesity was recognised as a chronic relapsing disease by the WHO in 1998. Obesity rates have been increasing since the 1970s into today epidemic levels.

It is only now with the availability and popularity of GLP1s as a treatment it is being discussed more widely and openly using the correct terms.

When I did Food and Nutrition O Level and Home Economics A Level in the late 60s/early 70s 2,000 calories a day for women was the recommended amount. Maybe people just used more energy. It's not a new figure though maybe it needs changing. I don't calorie count or eat ready-meals so it wouldn't make any difference to me.

Obviously it’s not the entire explanation for obesity, but I definitely think there’s something in it.

Similarly, I got some beautiful, new very long stemmed wine glasses that look big but the bowl part is not… now DH and I never finish a bottle of wine because it feels like we’ve had enough after three small glasses!

We also switched to smaller plates after autistic DD insisted her dinner plate be entirely covered in food and no pattern showing.
Nobody noticed we were eating slightly less!

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

What a wildly unprovable claim!

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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?

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

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'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!

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)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.