One of the challenges of healthy eating is how to reduce the portion sizes of the foods that you want to cut back on, yet without feeling deprived.
The answer involves an element of trickery to give the illusion that the portion sizes are larger than they actually are!
Use Smaller Plates & Serving Dishes
Scaling down the size of your plate can help you reduce your total intake of food. This is a good technique if your portions tend to err on the large side or if you want to cut down on high volume foods like starchy carbohydrates such as pasta, rice and potatoes.
It's also a good way of serving desserts. Espresso cups or shot glasses are ideal ways of serving smaller quantities of a rich dessert.
Just watch that reducing the size of your plate doesn't also reduce your vegetable portions because they need to increase not decrease!
Fan Out Meat & Poultry
This is a simple way to reduce the serving size of meat or poultry that is usually served as individual portions such as chicken/duck breasts or steaks.
If you cook smaller portions of meat but then before serving, slice the meat and fan it out slightly. The shape of the original piece of meat is still retained so it still looks like a sirloin steak or a chicken breast but it occupies more of the plate so it looks bigger.
Grate Cheese
With the recommended serving size being no large than a match box, it's all too easy to eat more cheese than you ought to! But, if you grate it then a little will go a long way.
Illusory Presentation
Skewing the perception of how much food is on the plate can be done in various different ways. You could serve part of the meal in a separate bowl on the plate, thread some of the food on skewers or use cooking rings or moulds to shape elements of the meal. Anything that makes it difficult to see how much food there really is on the plate.
