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Tip 4 - More Great Tips For Healthy Dinner Tables

5 February 2009

Our Eating Environment Can Encourage Bad Eating Habits

If you love chocolate but were trying to control your weight and not eat too much of it, how long would your willpower last if your boss left a chocolate bar on your desk for you at lunchtime every day? That's a bit of a silly example, but you get the idea - there are good reasons why we do not want to see a chocolate bar every afternoon, particularly if we have a great love of chocolate... we know it'd encourage us to eat more chocolate than we should.

Healthy Eating Is Easier If Our Environment Is Right

There are lots of other more subtle factors in our environment that influence our eating. I talked about this phenomenon more in my last blog post, read it again if you'd like to refresh your memory on the key points before you continue.

Identifying problem areas in our environment and fixing them is a great idea. Why? Because it makes healthy eating so much easier! Without those subconscious food prompts we'll find it easier to: eat good food and avoid overeating!

In previous blog postings I've talked about the best way to serve our snack foods, how to organise our fridge, and how to set our dinner table - to encourage healthy eating and prevent over-eating. Research clearly shows that making small changes to our environment is a highly effective way of improving our eating habits.

Big Is Not Better - When It Comes To Crockery And Cutlery

Crockery and cutlery have a strange effect on our eating habits - if they're bigger, we eat more. If they're smaller, we eat less. So simple and yet so true!

The simple fact is, we subconsciously use the serving implements such as bowls and cutlery as an indicator of how much we eat. Think about it - 'I have a bowl of cereal for breakfast', but how much cereal is that bowlful? Well its however much will fit in your bowl, so the bigger the bowl the bigger your breakfast. If I subtly changed the crockery in your house overnight and installed cereal bowls that held an ounce less in the dark of night, the next morning you would fill the bowl up to the same level and eat your breakfast. You'd have no idea that you'd potentially eaten an ounce less of breakfast cereal as a result.

And look at the bright side of this! We can use this knowledge to choose crockery and cutlery that best suits our needs - and if that is to decrease food intake then its smaller vessels, if it's to increase food intake (for growing, fussy children) than bigger bowls are better.

A Nutritionist's Perspective

Our dinner-set is a pretty standard size (no oversized plates or anything), but breakfast bowls are pretty large. We have a couple of smaller bowls that we sometimes use for breakfast - so I think we should make these the default breakfast bowls.

I've also never thought about the platters and bowls that I serve our main meals from. This is something I'm going to work on too.

Practical Advice - Set Your Dinner Table To Prevent Over-Eating

It's not really practical to go out and replace all the crockery and cutlery in your home, but you can do a few things to help the situation:

If you have a variety of plates at home - always choose the smaller bowls/plates for main meals;
Same rule when dining out - choose the smaller plates at the buffet;
If you only have large crockery at home, you might want to invest in a couple of small plates and bowls as a starting point rather than a whole dinnerset (with money, time, breakages of crockery, you can slowly convert over to an entire set of smaller crockery);
Use smaller serving spoons on the dinner table for serving food;
Use smaller serving vessels for main meals - to remove that illusion that you're serving a massive feast that must be eaten;
Serve snacks on small side plates, not big main plates;
Use delicate small teaspoons, rather than dessert spoons, to enjoy a sweet dessert. It'll take a lot longer to eat it and will encourage slow eating (another good habit);

Try these tips in your household, you can probably get away with a few changes (if you're the regular household chef) without your household even realising what you're up to! And that's always a bonus!

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