Recently I was part of a girls night out with a group of fabulous women who have all come together to support each other in our lives- both personal and work. We are all successful, own our business and need nights like these to let loose! There was laughing, crying and aha-moments that will lead to progress.
For our night out we traveled a few hours outside Image result for dinner plate sizesof the city to a bed and breakfast. We decided to not waste time going out to eat as we wanted to just stay in and enjoy each others company; so we treated the night like a picnic, each bringing something healthy to share.
The B&B owner was kind enough to set a table with the dishes out of her china cabinet. They were quite lovely and looked like something that have been passed down a few generations. I hoped to not accidentally break anything!
After filling the table with our abundant picnic food, we sat down to eat and quickly started to pass our yummy food. I made tacos using lentils as the filling with my super carrot ginger sauce (recipe coming soon) to top it off- finger licking good!
We didn’t get far on passing the food around though. As we started to fill our plates, we were all forced to stop after just taking one or two scoops of food. The plates in front of us were quite small, so small in fact that I’m pretty sure my salad plates are bigger than them. Our first response was that these must be the salad plates and our host must have thought we were eating in courses. So we asked for the dinner-sized plates; the response brought about a lengthy discussion of food portion sizes.
Turns out these little plates ARE, and have always been, her dinner plate size. Whhaaat? Really? Our responses varied from shocked to slightly embarrassed to a little nervous laughter.
I knew dinner plates in the United States have changed significantly over the past few decades, but to really see how much surprised even me!
Just a few decades ago, dinner plate sizes were 7-9 inches versus an average 12 inches today. Now, my creative side loves the look of a larger plates, it just gives more room for creative sauce design and I think it just looks better. So that is all great if you don’t overload the plate with food. The problem is that most of us (me included!) will not leave room for design and white space. We pile on extra scoops to fill the space. Sound familiar?
And if you grow up in the ‘clean your plate’ club, you don’t stop eating when you are full. Did you know that it takes 20 minutes for the stomach to signal the brain that it is full? When we have double helpings on our plate we never stop in for a ‘am I full’ check.
This doesn’t mean you have to go throw out your plates. Here are my top tips to combat dinner plate sabotage:
- Start with being more mindful of your plate size and portion size
- Try using a salad plate as your dinner plate 2 times a week.
- Have fun! Take a moment to ‘decorate’ your plate, even if you use the mustard in a squeeze bottle. Swirl on a squiggly line on part of your big dinner plate first. THEN add the food. Fun right?
Tell me how you are taking back control over your dinnerware in the comments below.
Happy Day
~Monique