re: #599 reine.de.tout

Even when people get sufficient physical activity - people are eating way too much food. People have started thinking that a portion of food they get in a restaurant order is a normal portion of food - and they serve themselves at home similar portion sizes.

A restaurant dinner is enough food for me for 2 or sometimes even 3 meals. It’s amazing how much food they serve - and people will eat every bit of it. And go home and fix dinner later with similar size portions.

Portion size is as big a part of the problem as inactivity and high-calorie foods.

It’s has changed somewhat here since this happened but about ten years ago my sister and I took a trip to Florida. We went to a restaurant and ordered a couple of appetizers and two meals. When the appy’s came we were absolutely blown away. They were massive. I ordered deep fried cheese sticks. Usually when I ordered them in a restaurant here you’d get half a dozen. This plate was piled up with them, 18 of them. It was nuts. Then when the dinners came they were on these huge plates mounded with food. My sister and I just sat there and laughed at the craziness of all of this food. We figured there were three to four meals worth of food.

We couldn’t take much away because we were traveling so about 3/4 of it ended up in the garbage. After that we would just order one meal and split it to the annoyance of the servers. We never were hungry.

Since then I’ve seen portion sizes in restaurants slowly increase here but never to the level that we found on that trip. Now when I go out I always know that I’m paying for two meals rather then one. I barely ever come home without lunch or dinner for the next day.