Can you lose weight with a smaller plate?

Portion control is important to losing weight and eating healthy. There’s many studies that show how well this can work for you. The natural extension of this might be not just the portion size of your food, but also the size of your plate. A lot of research has gone into this very question: does it make a difference whether you use a small or a large plate in how much you actually eat? The answer is yes, for adults, but not so much for kids.

Having a guide to portion size on the correct sized plate has been shown to help as well. "The Diet Plate" is a right sized dinner plate with outlines of the appropriate portion sizes printed directly on the plate. Researchers used a similar cereal bowl with rings painted on the inside to show serving sizes for cereal.

In a study of obese diabetics the scientists randomized half to use The Diet Plate and bowls. The rest simply followed their usual routine and recommendations from their doctors and dietitians. Over six months of use, the group who used The Diet Plate lost significantly more weight. Not a little bit, either, but the equivalent to a 300-pound man losing up to 17.1 pounds.