Forking It Over
So it’s good to know there may be simple tactics you can take to help retrain your eyes for sensibly sized bites and servings.
Such as choosing a bigger fork. This may help with the lag time between actual physical fullness and the moment that feeling is recognized by the brain.
Your brain looks to external cues for additional satiety information — like how much food is left on your plate.
And in the study, using a bigger fork made bigger, more visible, more obvious dents in the loads of pasta on people’s plate. Researchers specul ate that may be why people
ate less. The visual cues of the big dents made people think they’ d eaten more than they actually ha
d.
(Related: Find out what to eat for breakfast to kill afternoon cravings.)
Two More Paths to a Smaller Meal
The researchers cauti oned that, for now, these results
only seemed to apply to big servings on large plates.
But here are a couple of other things you can do to eat less, no matter what:
* Eat slowly. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for your brain to pick up satiety signals.
So put your fork down between bites and savor your meal.
* Use a sm
aller plate. Time and again, researchers find that people given larger plates will eat more.
Shrink the plate to shrink the meal.
(Related: Watch this 1-minute video guide on portion control.)
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