Facepalm: Researchers Have Found A Way To Trick Yourself Into Eating Less Pizza And It’s Ridiculously Obvious

Most of us could do with losing a little weight. And yet, similarly, most of us aren’t able to limit our pizza consumption; if there’s a steaming hot pie in front of us, the chances are that we’ll rapidly devour it piece by piece until the box or pan is empty. No sharing.

To help the thousands of individuals that suffer from willpower weakness when it comes to pizza, researchers have published a study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

In the published study, the researchers revealed a sure fire way to get yourself (and your guests, if you’re running short on pies) to eat less.

Tricking Subjects

In their study, the researchers placed four equal sized pizzas individually on two large tables and two small tables. Two pizzas were cut into sixteenths and two into eights.

When they invited subjects to feast on the pizzas, they found that subjects eating from the smaller tables were convinced that the pizzas were smaller, and so ate more slices to compensate.

The subjects eating at the bigger table, on the other hand, believed that the pizza cut into sixteen slices was a regular sized pizza, and that the slices (which were smaller than normal) were normal sized slices. So they ate what seemed like a regular amount of slices but, in reality, was actually less pizza overall.

The Bottom Line

A little confusing, no? In short, if you want to trick yourself or your family into eating less pizzas slices you should upgrade to a large table.

We can’t help but wonder, can this work in reverse? Perhaps we can start placing salad servings on smaller tables so we’ll eat more greens. Worth a try, don’t you think?