Plate size and portion control

One of the things I love about only eating plant-based, vegan food is that I don’t have to worry so much about portion control. Animal-based foods are so calorie-dense, it’s really easy to consume more calories than you need before you feel full. Plant-based foods on the other hand are generally high in nutrients but lower in calorie density, so you can pile your plate high with veggies and eat with abandon.

However, particularly if you want to lose weight, you might still need to apply a little common sense when it comes to the most calorie-dense plant foods such as oil or nuts – and cakes, biscuits and bread. That’s where a little portion-control does come in to it.

Children and adults sometimes struggle with a sense of (un)fairness when it comes to food – how come they’re getting more than you? But the idea that sharing food out fairly necessarily means sharing it out equally really isn’t doing anyone any favours. Appetites and calorie requirements vary widely depending on your age and how active you are, and depending on whether you’re trying to lose or gain weight, or just maintain the weight you are.

An interesting thought experiment is to work out how many calories each family member needs in a day and imagine you were sharing a pizza between all of you in proportion to those needs – in our family of four, the most active family member would need to eat HALF of that imaginary pizza, with the remaining half being split three ways between the other three family members. If we were to share the pizza equally between the four of us (which is what many people would perceive as “fair”), three of us would be eating too much, and one of us would not be getting enough – and that wouldn’t be fair on any of us!

Something that can make it easier to ensure that everybody gets an appropriately-sized portion is to abandon the convention of setting the table with a set of matching plates that are all the same size, and use plates and bowls of different sizes to reflect the different nutritional needs and appetites of different family members – adults as well as children.

Using smaller plates or bowls can also help to limit food waste – encouraging children to clear their plates or to eat “just one more spoonful” when they’ve said they are full is a hangover from times when food was scarce, but it teaches them to ignore their own satiety queues (i.e. recognizing when they’re full) and so really isn’t a good idea. Serving smaller portions on smaller plates (letting them come back for seconds if they want to) means you avoid the driver of the emotional response many of us have to seeing food wasted. For instance, when the children were small, I found I threw away a lot less uneaten cereal once I started using teacups instead of breakfast bowls. I still often serve children (and adults!) desserts such as ice-cream or banana-and-custard in teacups – they’re the perfect size for little appetites and the handle makes them easier for little hands to hold.

Don’t be afraid to talk to your children about calories and portion control because you think that children shouldn’t have to worry about their weight yet. Children shouldn’t have to worry about their weight. However, the best way of ensuring that they never have to, is to start instilling healthy habits around food now.

If we belonged to the Piaroa tribe of southern Venezuela, we’d be teaching our children how to catch and toast tarantulas because that’s a skill they’d need to survive in the environment they live in (in case you missed it, here’s the amazing clip from the BBC Human Planet series).

Instead, we live in an environment characterized by an abundance of highly-processed food products that are calorie dense and nutrient-poor – teaching our children about good nutrition, encouraging them to listen to their own satiety queues, and helping them form healthy food habits is just giving them the skills they need to survive in the world in which they are growing up…