Portion Control: How big are your dinner plates?

For most people weight loss - or a better term would be weight control - is intrinsic to running. Elite runners and triathletes are always conscious of their weight because they know that if they carry extra weight, it will slow them down. Many middle of the pack runners, like myself, are conscious of our weight, not so much because we want to become faster, but just because we always want to be slimmer. In fact, many people started running/walking for the express purpose of losing weight. So, any issue related to better weight control is related to running, which brings me to the topic of this post.
I keep hearing the term 'portion control' lately. My brother shared an interesting tidbit with me yesterday, and I thought I would pass it along. Did you know that you have to run or walk the length of a football field just to burn off the calories from eating a single m&m? Yep. That's food for thought . . . couldn't resist that pun.
Mindless snacking, grabbing a handful of candy from the candy dish at the office, is certainly one of the worst things we do to our bodies.
I watched a story on TV the other day about the size of dinner plates. It seems that the average dinner plate has grown a good bit over the years. If you pull out your  grandmother's china and compare that to the dinner plates in your cupboard, you will probably notice a difference in diameter of 1" to 3". On this TV program they took two groups of people and served each group an identical buffet meal. Each buffet was identical, but the dinner plates given one group were two inches smaller in diameter. They weighed the buffet before and after the meal for each group, and the group with the larger diameter plates ate several pounds more food. It was more involved than that, but that's the gist of the experiment.
One other thing they did on the same show is put exactly the same amount of food on each of the plates. It was amazing that it looked like so much more food on the big plate and so much less food on the small plate. Our eyes so often deceive us, don't they? Losing weight might be as easy as getting smaller plates.
And here is another morsel to chew on. Remember when a Coke was only 8 ounces? That  was the standard size. Now we think those bottles are 'cute' because they are so small compared to what is typical today. Remember the excitement when the first soft drink company started offering 16 ounce bottles? That was huge! Now a few soft drink companies are, once again, offering a small size. That is encouraging, but I still see people drinking those Big Gulps. I don't even want to think about how many calories is in one of those, and if it is a dietetic beverage, then I don't want to think about how  much of some chemical sugar substitute is in there.
I'm glad Milt told me about the m&m. Knowledge really is power, and now that I have that concrete image of a football field in my mind, I will always see those yummy m&m's in a different light.