Magical Diet Plate
This is actually pretty cool: without being told to exercise or change their lifestyles, overweight people with diabetes were able to lose weight and cut down on the need for diabetes medication. How? By eating off of a magical diet plate.
[The] subjects used the so-called Diet Plate, a British-made tool that allows people to measure out portions of carbohydrates, proteins, sauces and fruits and vegetables. The manufacturer donated the plates, but did not fund the study. No one was told to make big lifestyle changes, such as exercising more or less.
Of those who used the plate for six months, 17 percent lost 5 percent or more of their weight, an amount considered clinically important because it cuts risks of obesity-related conditions like heart disease and cancer, Pedersen said. In the group that didn’t use the plate, fewer than one person in 20 lost a clinically important amount.
This site shows a picture of the plate, and also mentions that there are different plates for men and women. The only drawback I can see is that you’d actually have to make things from each food group to put on the plate. I don’t know how my microwave Lean Cuisine pizza fits into this equation. It probably does not.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Food, Health, International, Weight Loss
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Does the magical plate come with magical beans that we can toss into some dirt to grow a beanstalk so that we can go to the land of the giants who live in the sky where we can steal a goose that farts out golden eggs? If not, i’ll be damned if i pay $40 for a freaking plate.
Obviously, people who are fat are too stupid to know how to eat well, and too lazy to notice the amount of food we shovel down our throats on a regular basis.
I’m much more fond of this kind of plate. Even the dog wants in on it. (And before anyone freaks out about one person eating that amount of food in one serving: it was shared between two people, and snacked on periodically over the course of an entire day.)
Huh. I’d actually be intrigued by it as a useful tool for healthy eating if it weren’t covered with diet tips. Because we are, pretty much, woefully in the dark about nutrition. A plate that could help me eat balanced meals might take a lot of the guess work out of the process that discourages me from eating in the first place!
And, Lindsay, that plate looks like a delicious all-day grazing situation indeed.
Lindsey, you should read the book “Mindless Eating.” It talks about all the social cues that make us overeat and it turns out it’s both fat *and* thin people who are too lazy to notice the amount of food we shovel down our throats on a regular basis! They play pranks on people with refilling soup bowels and stale popcorn too, which makes me want to be a food researcher.
And I would buy one of these plates if it wasn’t so expensive. Maybe I can take a ceramics class and make my own :)
I *am* too stupid (or sometimes willfully ignorant) to know what a serving size is so I ended up buying these measuring bowls. It helps when I remember and care enough to use them. Way cheaper than the plate and multitaskers too!
Darn you for linking to those bowls, beth. I am now $11.00 poorer (including shipping).
Whoops. Looks like I screwed up a tag.
And that means…83% of people who used the plate didn’t lose even 5% of their weight (maybe 10 pounds?) in a six-month period. Great. So that means that those whose starting weight was a function of overeating benefitted from using the plate, and those whose weight was related to other factors didn’t. But I’ll never get a journalism job thinking like that, now will I?
Well, Meowser, compare that 83% who didn’t lose that weight WITH the plate to the 95% who didn’t lose it WITHOUT it. I’d rather be in the group with the lower chance of *not* losing the weight.
Also, that plate is expensive, but much cheaper than buying a gym membership or subscribing to Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem or Weight Watchers. I kind of think this is a neat idea.
The problem with that, Quirkybook, is that it’s widely assumed that everyone who is fat is so only as a function of overeating. If anything, a study like this confirms what loudmouth yobbos like me have been saying all along — that (aside from instances of radical starvation or forcefeeding) for most (not all, but most) of us food intake plays only a very minor role at most in what we weigh in the long run. People don’t want to believe that, though, which is why I’m sure they’ll make millions from this plate.
Meowser, I’m a biologist who studies obesity, and what you’re saying is not consistent with what the research says. To the contrary, virtually all people who reduce the number of calories they eat will lose weight. The problem most people have is that it is extraordinarily difficult to permanently and significantly change one’s eating habits.
I do wonder, though, how the experiment would have turned out if they had done a control where they just used any old plate and told people to put their food on that. I think so much of the success ascribed to various diet plans is really just a matter of people just generally being more mindful of what they are eating and as a result eating less.
I would never think that this plate is a cure-all for all overweight people, Meowser. But neither do I believe that food intake plays a “minor role” for most people’s weight. For someone like myself (where I *do* believe portion control is a big challenge to my weight management), I’d invest in the Magic Plate in a heartbeat.
And La Wade, is that not what the control was in this study, just using regular old plates? Or are you saying that the control should have been that everyone in that arm uses the *same* regular plate? I agree with your last sentence, but I’d be inclined to think that both arms of the study were being “mindful,” so the success of the Magic Plate isn’t really attributable to that mindfulness. (I’m assuming that everyone got some kind of instruction on what constitutes healthy eating, since that’s fairly typical for these behavioral intervention studies.)
Yes, I meant the same regular old plate. Even in a setting where all the participants were receiving instruction on healthy eating, I can’t help but think that the ritual of putting all your food on a “special” plate before you eat it would contribute to your awareness of what and how much you are eating, even if there is nothing printed on the plate.
La Wade, I know many, many women, myself included, who have reduced our calorie intake and increased our exercise considerably for long periods of time and have not lost weight, or at least not enough to be statistically significant. I know women who have endured hours a day of gutbusting workouts and minuscule calorie counts for years and did not become anywhere close to thin. Does your “biology research” ever monitor serial dieters who have been at it since childhood? Or women with PCOS? Or people on long-term psychotropic medications? Just how hard are we supposed to try, just how much are we supposed to starve and give up every moment spare time to aerobic activity, in order not to be hated?
Meowser, all I’m saying is that weight loss is physically possible for most people, not that it is practical or that it is the best choice for everyone. And I certainly don’t advocate hating anyone on the basis of their weight! All the factors you list and others are all very good reasons why most people find it hard to achieve permanent weight loss. But that is different from saying that food intake plays a “very minor” role in one’s weight.
I want a magic plate. However I want mine to instruct me when not to eat things that make my palate go YAY while my digestive system says BITCH PLEASE.
Cause I’d rather do that than lose ten pounds.
Think they’d do that for me?
The plate sounds interesting – but too many foods just would fit … after all a big bowl of fresh green salad isn’t going to be fit, a nice low fat yummy soup isn’t going to fit. But I suppose as way to learn portion size it’s a novel idea.
Have you seen the Fit and Light yogurt ads in Brazil? I just posted about them and first thing I thought of us was your blog – I took a quick look and didn’t see a post about it, so thought I’d mention it. I’m definitely boycotting fit & light.
Lady Rose
The entry about those ads is here, Lady Rose!
Pretty nifty thing girls….I like the idea of a plate that can encourage me!
Hmmm. Much though I love you, Quirky, I have a feeling the plate wouldn’t do much for me, because what I eat off plates is totally healthy. It’s the impulse-bought chocolate bars and random pieces of cheese at moments of stress…
I’m kidding, but only sort of. I find it easy to be mindful at mealtimes, but I just have to avoid any kind of snack, even supposedly healthy ones.