Lesson From The Past

My mom has always possessed a great quality - planning ahead. So, when I was still a little girl, like 6, she started collecting a dowry for me (yes, those were different times!).  Many fine things were not available in Yerevan, where I was growing up, so whenever we would travel to Russia or Ukraine, she would be on the mission to find beautiful linens or dining sets.  (Awww, thank you mom!) But back then... oh, I remember those dreadful days when she was dragging me to the stores on the way to or back from the parks and zoos. Fast-forwarding fifteen years, my mom gladly presented to us all the things she collected throughout the years, and some of those things, like dinnerware, actually made its way across the ocean when my family immigrated here.

Another twenty years had passed, and I ended up buying many other dinnerware sets and stopped using the one my mom gave me.

So today, when I was thinking about healthy eating and how to stop the steady weight-gain, I thought to myself that I must develop another habit.

Habit #2
Portion control, portion control, portion control! Eat out of small plates!

Did you know that we usually eat most of what is on our plate, no matter what size plate we use?

Well, all the plates I use at home are standard size.  At first I thought that whenever I put food on my plate, I then should take maybe a third off the plate, and get used to this portion size.  But then, I thought of the plates my mom gave me and see if they are any different.

And here is what I found!

Can you guess which one is which?

As you see, my old dinner plate is almost the size of my new salad plate!

Can you even see the dinner plate under the new salad plate?

  

Somehow, as years went by, we moved from eating out of standard 9" dinner plates to eating out of standard 11" dinner plates!

I went to ask for help from the awesomest person I know who knows math -  Robert. He explained to me that... okay, I stopped paying attention to his explanation as to how to calculate the ratio between 9"diameter circle and 11" diameter circle, but the final answer was that in the relationship between the two circles, an 11"circle is about 30% bigger than a 9" circle. I am not even calculating the additional difference between the two salad plates!

Apparently, we are now eating 30% more food than before!

Just saying...

xo,  Zuma A.