Clean your plate. That was mom’s rule of fork and finger at the dinner table for little kids everywhere. But the adage that hung above a full plate of untouched broccoli, stuck around as portion sizes got larger, waistlines expanded, type 2 Diabetes ran rampant, and Americans grew increasingly unable to eat with portion control.
These days, the facts are in the fat, and the fat is on our plates. A study in the journal Appetite found that people clean their plates an astonishing 91% of the time, even if they’re full. This wouldn’t be so terrible if American portion sizes hadn’t increased significantly since the 1970’s. According to the World Health Organization, there is a direct correlation between portion size and the obesity crisis our country faces.
Do we really need the portions we consume? Often times, no. It takes your stomach about 20 minutes to tell your brain that you’re full. There is a whole lot of shoveling that happens in 20 minutes. We just forget to stop when a plate, brimming with delicious food, is set in front of us. Eyes bigger than your stomach. That’s another one pulled from the annals of mom’s table-isms that definitely rings true.
So when Tatyana Beldock, a Harvard Business School graduate with extensive healthcare experience and a passion for design, realized she needed to whittle her waistline after the birth of her children, she came up with a stylish way to control portions. Tatyana wanted to use scientifically-based portion control to make eating healthy feel effortless, discreet and luxurious.
The result was Slim & Sage, a 9-inch plate (as opposed to the standard 12), designed for meal optimization. The geometric patterns set within the 9-inches hide the proportions you need to build a sensible diet: one-quarter of the plate is for lean protein, one-quarter for whole grains, and one-half is for vegetables.
When broken down with a meal it looks like this:
The logic is simple and the execution doesn’t scream lady on a diet. The data from Appetite suggests that switching from a 12-inch plate to a 9-inch plate may help reduce caloric intake by up to 48%, or up to 275-350 fewer calories per meal.
So, this spring as you ponder what diet you’ll endeavor to test before swimsuit season, why not try Slim & Sage and add a new adage to the dinner table. Smaller is better. –Arianna Schioldager
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