Ashley Holloway It’s Sabotage!
MS, RD, CSG, ACE-CHC, LDN, FAND two scoops of pasta when using a 10-inch plate versus three scoops on a 12-inch plate, resulting in an extra 60 calories. If you eat off of big plates every day, three meals a day, those extra unwanted and un-noticed calories will add up fast! The remedy: Use small dishes to eat from. You will serve yourself less and not even know it!
Now that the new year is here, it is the perfect time to pick up a few healthy habits. There are many small, simple changes that we can make to help us to live a healthier lifestyle. Being fit and at healthy weight for our individual body should not require calorie counting, obsessing over food labels or exercising so hard or for so long that we injure ourselves. Surprisingly, we often sabotage our efforts to eat less and move more without even realizing it. Here are four ways we sabotage ourselves and some simple remedies to help you eat less and move more.
The sabotage: Keeping food on the kitchen counters and dining room table. Remember the old adage … out of sight, out of mind? Well, it holds true! Did you know that what you keep out on your counters may roughly predict just how much you weigh? We tend to eat what we can see. Dr. Wansick determined that women who kept potato chips visible on their kitchen counter weighed 9 pounds more on average than those who didn’t. And those who had even one box of breakfast cereal in plain sight on the counter weighed 21 pounds more! If you see it, you are more likely to eat it. According to the study, you are also three times more likely to eat the first food you see in the cupboard or the refrigerator than the fifth thing you see. The remedy: To keep your weight from creeping up, keep healthy snacks visible on the counter and keep the foods with empty calories stored in the cupboard or cabinet. Out of sight, out of mind, and out of your mouth!
The sabotage: Using large bowls and plates. If you use a giant bowl for your cereal, you are likely
eating quite a bit more than you think. Our eyes can trick us into thinking we are eating less than we think. That giant bowl of cereal you are eating has on average at least 22% or more cereal in it than if you had poured the cereal into a smaller bowl. The visual effects on our children are even worse. If your kids are eating out of these big bowls, they are likely to serve themselves up to 43% more because they are even more influenced by the visual appearance of food. An interesting study by Dr. Wansink, of Cornell University, and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (Bantam Books), found that people serve themselves 9
The sabotage: Eating “family style.” Eating together as a family has definite benefits. It creates lasting bonds, inspires togetherness and teaches values. But serving food from bowls and platters
