Why only eat until you're 80% full?

Why are some people naturally slender and manage to keep weight off all their lives? This might just be because some people are far more aware of how much food their bodies actually needs. All the guidelines and stats in the world are fine, but sometimes just simple intuition is the best method for helping to keep weight off. The problem is that most of us have unconsciously learnt bad habits picked up even from childhood (not that you should go away after reading this and immediately blame your parents!), but we tend to eat until we’re full, rather than not feeling hungry anymore; there’s a subtle difference between the two but it can have a huge impact on controlling our weight. Many of us by habit just eat everything on our plate without considering whether that’s what we actually need or not.

Hara Hachi Bu:

‘Hara Hachi Bu’ is a Japanese phrase to remind people to stop eating when they're 80% full, or ‘not hungry any more’ (also note that the Japanese eat when they’re actually hungry, rather than it being just because it’s a designated meal time). In particular, there is a region in Japan called, Okinawa where its population is renowned for leading very long and healthy lives. Okinawan elders have supposedly been known to say ‘Hara Hachi Bu’ at the start of meals to remind themselves and others that they should stop eating when their stomachs are 80% full. Research has shown that while the average middle aged American eats around 2,500 calories per day, Okinawans eat just 1,900, less for women.

How to do it?

Some very simple strategies can be used to put this into practice:

• Take time to eat your meals i.e SLOW DOWN. Finishing your meal first wins you no prizes. It usually takes 10-20 minutes for all our digestive hormones to kick in and signal to us that we’re full or have over eaten, therefore allowing yourself time between mouthfuls to chew your food thoroughly will benefit the whole digestive process. Before taking each bite of your meal, take time to register whether you’re still hungry or not.

• Make food the focus - eating with your phone in your hand or in front of the TV will inevitably lead to distraction so you’re unable to check in with your body and see whether you’re still hungry or not. We tend to eat more slowly, consume less and savor what we’re eating more too if we’re just focusing on our meal.

• Eat using smaller plates - our plates tend to be supersized these days and we use them as a visual guide as to how much food we need (especially given the government guidelines also use a plate). Serve your meals on smaller plates and don’t overload them; similarly use tall, narrow glasses for beverages. This is a great way of training ourselves to eat less without thinking about it too much and measuring out our meals.

• You could also begin by just eating half of what you usually eat and then checking in to see how you feel. This is a great way of reducing your portion sizes significantly.

A lot of us find that our hunger/satiety mechanism is broken and from a young age we’ve always overridden our body’s signals to tell us when we’ve had enough. This takes time to correct given we do this day-in day-out over many years but if you persist with smaller portion sizes, your body will eventually correct itself; some believe it takes around 20 meals to do this.