Is Leaving Food on Your Plate Such a Waste?

When we try to change our eating and exercise behaviours, it is useful to reflect on your personal history and see how it may have shaped your life: your childhood can have a very big impact on current behaviours!

One such area in your personal history is reflecting back on family meal patterns. You may recall that your parents may have conditioned you to believe that wasting food was sinful, either because food was expensive or because there were other people in the world who were starving. This is particularly true for people who grew up during the depression or war years, or even for people whose parents grew up during that time. It is likely that you were not allowed to leave the table unless you “cleaned your plate”: that is, finished every mouthful.

If you can relate to the statements above, trying to ‘practise the habit’ of leaving food on our plate, may help to undo the conditioning to associate leftover food with guilt. To help begin the reconditioning process, you may like to think of it this way: excess food in your stomach is wasted food, just as it is wasted in the rubbish bin. In fact excess food in your stomach is even more of a waste than excess food in the bin, because when it is in your stomach it may lead to weight gain and poor health. Or consider that when you eat the leftover food so as not to waste it, you are in fact treating yourself like a rubbish bin!

Leaving food on your plate is a great habit in situations where you are not in control of your serve size. By practising leaving food on your plate, you will be more likely to leave portions of higher fat foods at occasions such as parties or dining out, and to restrict your intake of highly desired foods to portions you can enjoy in a nutritionally sensible way.

7 steps to help introduce this new behaviour

Many people can find it challenging to leave food on their plate at first, so we have listed seven steps to help you introduce the behaviour gradually:

1. Start with a food that is not a favourite. At dinner time, cook slightly more of this food so you can leave a few mouthfuls of it on your plate
2. Aim to leave one mouthful on the plate at first. While this may be nutritionally negligible it can be psychologically important: you teach yourself that you can begin to leave food on your plate. You can leave more food on your plate later
3. When you serve the food, place the extra mouthfuls to one side. If you are eating with other people, let them know what you intend to do so they can be supportive and remind you of your goal
4. When the only food remaining on your plate is what you intended to leave, scrape it into the bin immediately
5. Try placing your serviette on top of your remaining food to indicate that you have finished eating and to reduce your likelihood of starting again
6. Organise an activity to keep you occupied after dinner (e.g. going for a walk or calling a friend) to help you forget about the food you left behind
7. As you become more confident, you can gradually apply these steps to foods that you find more tempting.

Note that you do not have to leave food on your plate at the end of every meal: it only applies to situations where the portions that you are given are greater than your usual serves. It is better to avoid the issue altogether by serving yourself an appropriate portion size to begin with.

So, portion control can go a long way to help you keep your food intake within reasonable quantities. A quick refresh on healthy proportions of the major food groups are illustrated diagrammatically below:

Another very simple way to work out your serve sizes is to take a look at your hands!! A portion of meat and meat alternatives should be the size and thickness of your palm, a portion of breads, cereals and starchy vegetables should be the size and thickness of your fist and a portion of vegetables should be able to sit in your outstretched hands: