The bigger your dishes the more you eat.

Big Plates, Big Meals

Most people fill their plate with food and we’ve already seen in other threats how you eat everything on your plate. So the size of your plate has a lot do with how much you eat.

The typical American dinner plate has an 11-inch diameter. If you lay a ruler through the center of a plate, the diameter would be the length from one side of the plate to the other side. European dinner plates typically have a 9-inch diameter. And many restaurant dinner plates now have a 13-inch diameter.

You might think a 2 inch difference in diameter can’t make a big difference in how much you eat. Well, through the magic of math (the area of circle is πr²) it turns out to make a really big difference.

An 11-inch plate has 50% more surface area than a 9-inch plate. And a 13-inch plate has twice the surface area of a 9-inch plate. That’s a huge difference!

When using a 11-inch plate then you can fit about 50% more food than on a 9-inch one. And a 13-inch plate can hold an astonishing two times as much food compared to a 9-inch plate.

This difference is completely unintuitive as is the effect it can have on how much you eat. But the size of your plate can cause you to eat a lot more than you expect.

You Drink More from Short Wide Glasses

People naturally pour up to 32% more of a drink into shorter and wider containers. That’s a lot of extra calories from just the shape of a glass.

Big Bowls, Big Servings

In a study called Ice Cream Illusions from Cornell University and Eastern Illinois University, researchers think they have found a tendency for humans to judge object sizes based on comparisons with neighboring items.

This means that in real life you will serve yourself more food when using big containers.

This study found that people served themselves 31 percent more ice cream when they were given a 34-ounce bowl instead of a 17-ounce bowl. A 34-ounce bowl is the same size as a typical salad bowl. In my power eating days I always used a salad bowl for ice cream. If you try hard enough, you can fit a lot of ice cream in a salad bowl. J

Big Spoons, Big Servings

The Ice Cream Illusions study also found that you will serve yourself 14.5 percent more when using a 3-ounce spoon instead of a 2-ounce spoon. To get a feel for the sizes, because nobody knows how big spoons are in ounces, a 3-ounce spoon is 6 tablespoons and a 2-ounce spoon is 4 tablespoons (¼ cup).

When people are given both a big bowl and a big spoon, they served themselves an astounding 56.8 percent more ice cream, without being aware they were serving themselves more.

Who were the people in this study? A group of nutrition experts! You can imagine, if nutrition experts are so bad at estimating serving sizes, then the rest of us must be even worse.

You Eat What You Serve

In The Finish Your Plate Threat we saw how people tend to eat everything put in front of them. The Ice Cream Illusions researchers found the same thing. They found people ate 92 percent of the food they served themselves.

This threat seems subtle. We don’t often pay attention to what dishes and utensils we use to serve our food, but as we’ve seen it makes an enormous difference. People really just aren’t very good at estimating how much food they are eating or serving.