If they are white plates, the answer may be yes. You may be eating more food than you need—especially foods like white rice or mashed potatoes. br
Also, choose a tall, narrow glass for your cocktails, not short, wide tumblers, you’ll drink less.
Both very ight lights and very low lights make us eat more. Fast, up tempo music has the same effect. And turn off that TV. It is a great distraction so we don’t keep track of what we have eaten. We also tend to keep pace with the program and shovel it in during the rapid-fire excitement of some shows. What you watch can have an impact. [For instance, I never watched an episode of The Sopranos without craving Italian food—not all that easy to find in the California desert where I lived at the time. But there was one place: Actor William Devane ran an eponymous restaurant there at the time which advertised, “Not Northern Italian, Not Southern Italian, but Jersey Italian.” Tony and Carmela knew just what that meant.]
And if you are serving pasta with meatballs for four but made enough for eight, put the extra portions away in the fridge or freezer before you serve dinner. And eat where you can’t see the pots and pans. We can eat up to 75 percent more food if we know there is more food to be had!
All of this nifty advice is entertainingly doled out by a women-targeted health website, Healthista.com They are a British site—smart and droll. According to their mission statement, they promise “no women smiling at a salad, ever.” You gotta love that.
One of our favorite tips to limiting snacking in your living room made us laugh out loud—get rid of your coffee table. Or at the very least, move those tables to more than an arm’s length away.
--Sarah Hagerty