Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the nutrition

Diva quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous all this month I'm taking

a closer look at some popular but conflicting theories about diet and weight loss.

My theory is that people are different and that no single approach is going to work for everyone,

so the question isn't really what works best but

what works best for you. Last week I talked about the theory behind low-carb diets and

then a bunch of us did a week-long experiment where we cut out refined

carbohydrates just to see how that worked for us. This week I'd like to talk about a

completely different approach and do a completely different experiment. Now if you're

doing the experiments with me this month

I'm dying to hear how it's going for you. You can post your comments on the show's

webpage which is at Nutrit com or on the Nutrition Diva Facebook page.

As I explained last week, one of the main arguments for a low-carb diet

is that when you reduce carbohydrates, it theoretically reduces your appetite.

You're not as hungry and therefore you eat less and so you lose weight.

But that assumes that we only eat when we're hungry and that we stop when we're full.

But in fact, there's a growing body of evidence showing that environmental cues may have a much bigger impact on how much we eat than physiological hunger.

Factors such as how much food is on the table or in the package, how much the people around us are eating,

and even how big our plates are have a huge effect on how much we eat.

For example, researchers have observed that the average size of a dinner plate in the 1950s was about 9 inches across.

By the 80s it had grown to 11 inches and today the average dinner plate is a whopping 13 inches in diameter. The increase in obesity rates parallels

the increase in dinner plate size almost exactly. Coincidence? Well some people

...