Transcripts

Lisa Young:
You know research shows that people eat what they're given. And even if they don't finish everything, they will eat more if they are presented with a larger food portion or if they buy a bigger package.

Registered Dietician Lisa Young author of the book, The Portion Teller.

So you buy a super-size bag of chips. You know you're not supposed to eat the whole thing. But you just keep eating it because you feel like, Oh there's half left." So we eat more when the packages we buy are bigger.

And portions in restaurants have gotten ridiculously huge.

We're getting steaks that are like 4 or 5 decks of cards worth. That is too much for one person. And people should realize that - that the restaurant is not necessarily serving an amount of food that is appropriate, they're serving an amount of food to increase sales. And the truth of the matter is, if a place serves a small portion, you're not going to go back.

There's a psychology about eating, says Lisa, that really works against us.

If we were to eat 2 candy bars, or 2 ice cream cones, or 2 Coca-Cola cans, we would feel fat…"Oh my God, I just ate 2 I feel like a pig." But if you were to eat just 1 jumbo cookie, or 1 big soda that's ½ a gallon of soda, you could still rationalize, "but it's only 1."

Tomorrow how to implement this knowledge and lose 10 to 20 lbs. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.