The Blog
Need To Get Your Eating Under Control?
Friday 25th January 2019
By the Barefaced Eating Blogger
This is an easy one. Simple switch, with a bit of thought and you could get things back under control.
Plates! This is a bit of common sense really. This isn't just about squeezing your evening meal on to a side plate from your old set from the 1980s (who needs to buy new plates when the old set work still?). This "small plate" idea has been fed to us via various channels over the years, encouraging us to eat less to lose weight. Many of us may have sat around the family table feeling like an 8 year old, with a tiny plate, but still piled high. This control tip though is about embracing the new world of plate power!
Plate power is all about how your food looks. Generating a pretty plate of healthy ingredients actually makes your feel "good". Even before you have eaten it! You will start looking at ingredients a little differently, the various colours, textures and tastes that scream at us from the supermarket, market or farm shops. You will feel like you are making positive changes to what you eat, celebrating what you can eat and not focusing on the stuff you can't.
The actual plate is an important tool to set your meal off. Long gone were the days of a matching dinner set with teapot, sugar pot and milk jug. We are talking about odd plates of beauty. A mishmash of patterns and colours. The more misshapen and battered looking the better it would seem. Earthenware, glazed in stone colours, speckled, matt, gloss, rustic, you are going to have a ball with this! Find ones you love!
The Barefaced Kitchen is full of odd plates found in charity shops and jumble sales. A few of the high street shops offer some wonderful designs at a price (just buy one!), on line you can find some amazing potters offering some unique pieces. Remember, don't buy a set, just find a collection of colours and patterns that compliment each other well.
Large oval platters are a wonderful find in the charity shops. Display a pretty salad on one of those and you may find yourself being mistaken for Jamie Oliver! A large beautiful bowl in the kitchen for fruit, to entice you to eat a healthy snack and a collection of different bowls for snacks, fruit salads and other finger foods.
Many restaurants that are new, up and coming and set to make an impact, the ones that pay high attention to the detail of the cutlery, crockery, tableware and decor, may be places you have noticed plates. Can you recall a meal being presented to you and thought "ooh, that looks lovely" and secretly wondered where the plate came from?
You could go mad with this and become a food stylist, but just start by encouraging your plate to look like an appetising, healthy, correctly portioned meal that you look forward to tucking into. Take control of the amount of what you are eating and think about how fresh and tasty it could look - you will find a healthier you quite quickly.