The apartment we rented when we first moved to Canada was furnished with enormous divans – at 76 inches wide they surpassed even a British “super king”. We stowed the bedding we’d brought with us and headed to Costco to kit ourselves out with stuff that would fit.
That rental came to an end recently. The beds in our new place were supposed to be the same as our UK king size but when we moved in, we were flummoxed. The new bed appeared preposterously small. My partner and I stood looking at it, disconcerted by what such obligatory proximity might mean for sleep quality. Yet when we got one of our fitted sheets from home, it slipped snugly into place. Six months sleeping on an acreage had completely distorted our perception of normality. What our eyes were telling us was a laughably diminutive mattress was exactly what we had slumbered comfortably on for years.
The same kind of trompe l’œil is an important factor in the current obesity epidemic. Standard dinner plates are two to three inches larger in diameter than they were 50 years ago. When we’re cooking at home, were we to dish up the kind of serving that would have satisfied someone in the 1970s, it would look like we were short-changing ourselves. Wine glasses have doubled in size since the 1990s, their bowls now averaging a volume approaching half a litre, making a once standard measure seem like a miserly dribble.
None of this would matter if we knew when to stop, but our sense of satiety lags at least 20 minutes behind our consumption. Studies have repeatedly confirmed that, under laboratory conditions at least, supersize portions result in our eating around a third more calories than if the food had been served in more modest helpings. Real-life experiments conducted in bars have found that wine sales increase by 10 per cent through the simple expedient of using bigger glasses.
Tableware has enlarged partly because of changing fashions but domestic crockery has also tracked the “portion distortion” in the wider food industry. Pies or ready-meals from supermarkets have expanded by more than 50 per cent since the early 1990s. Burgers and servings of fries have trebled in weight since fast-food outlets began appearing in the 1950s; the volume of fizzy drink that might accompany them has swollen sixfold. Single meals in restaurants now frequently outstrip a person’s total daily energy requirement. On average, we’re consuming around 500 calories more per day than our recent forebears.
Some highly processed foodstuffs actively circumvent our satiety signals. Sugar, fat and salt combined in specific ratios (found in no naturally occurring foods) open a hotline between our taste buds and our brains’ reward centres, driving compulsive consumption. Anyone who’s found themselves at the wrong end of a pack of biscuits having started out intending to enjoy a small treat will attest to this addictive quality. Such carbohydrate-dense foodstuffs provoke high levels of insulin secretion, driving the conversion of calories to fat and blunting the hormonal signals that tell us when we’ve had enough.
We also have a clearer idea why traditional calorie-controlled diets rarely work. Our brains target a weight “set-point” designed to ensure we have enough stores to survive a prolonged period of scarcity. Calorie restriction mimics famine conditions. Our metabolism gets turned down to reduce energy requirements, and irresistible cravings soon override all but the strongest willpower, bringing weight back up – in fact, to a new set-point that is typically greater than was there before.
GLP-1s – skinny jabs – dampen these cravings, but don’t dial down our set-point. That probably only happens with a sustained change away from foods and drinks that provoke insulin surges. Reducing portion sizes will make a substantial contribution as well, and that probably involves recalibrating what our eyes perceive as normal. Time for crockery manufacturers to market some “retro” ranges, perhaps?
[Further reading: My first kleptomania patient]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes