#3. Sleighting our appetites with proportionate dining Monday, July 13, 2020. Once your kitchen is stocked with the right foods, dietary success is mostly a matter of portion control. And portion control is partly a matter of perception. We've all had the experience of opening a bag of chips or box of cereal (or some other health-petrifying processed food) and found the package to be half full... and felt cheated... and said as much to the person sitting next to us: "It's all air!" In this moment, your snack companion might utter that honest-but-unhelpful wisdom, "Cool Ranch Doritos are sold by weight, not volume." Your sassy companion is correct: every single gram promised by the packaging is contained within. But it doesn't feel like it. Because the container is so much bigger than its contents. So we find our appetites lingering after consumption. Let's coin this phenomenon -- this hijacking of our perceptions -- "sleight of appetite". Sleight of whatever (usually hand) is critical for a magician's success. But it can also be a pretty useful trick to help us achieve our fitness goals. How do we use it? By employing The Law of Proportionate Dining (the second coinage of this blog), which states that the size of our china (bowls and plates) affects the amount of food we eat in a meal. Tip time: Tip 1) Do you want to grow into summin' massive? Then increase the dimensions of your dinnerware. Put huge servings on even huger plates. That's the only way you'll be able to surpass the ceiling of satiety and ingest enough calories. Because even the most absurd helping appears modest when heaped onto China-sized china. Tip 2) Want to slim down, trim up, and slender sideways? Petite servings look pretty gluttonous on even-petiter dinnerware. And the illusion of gluttony begets the sensation of satiety. Tip 3) If you want to slim even further down and trim even further up, then never eat out of the package. You don't register these foods in the same way. Emotionally, I mean. Physically, your body is a remarkable accountant: it will register every calorie received, and find some bank in which to make deposits (some stretch of hip or stomach geography). If we put those calories on china en route to our mouths, however, that enables our emotions to tabulate the calories as well. Very helpful if we want to exert any control over our portions. And necessary if we want to sleight our way to success.