You Can Stay in the Clean Plate Club, But . . .

As a child I was vigorously urged to clean up every scrap of food on my plate, with the admonition that “The starving children of Europe would be glad of that”. We were encouraged to become members of the “Clean Plate Club”, and I still find it hard to push away from the table with food left uneaten.

Help now comes with an aid to portion control: commercially available tableware that is calibrated in different calorie quantities. A study reported in Archives of Internal Medicine used cereal bowls and dinner plates marked for different portion sizes - 200 calories for the cereal bowl, and 650 or 800 calories for the dinner plate (for women and men, respectively). 130 obese patients with type 2 diabetes were assigned to using the portion control plates or usual care, for 6 months. Those using the plates lost significantly more weight: 1.8% loss for the plate-users vs. 0.1% for the controls. And the diabetic plate-users were able to safely decrease their diabetic medications by 26%, vs. 11% for the controls.

All this means that there’s a way for you to lose weight and yet still retain membership in the Clean Plate Club – unless you’re trying to embark on a volumetric diet! (More on volumetrics another time.)