Christmas may seem a strange time to be talking about food and smallness. After all, it’s a season renowned for excess. Letting your hair down is the thing that makes it celebratory.

But I know from hearing it over and again, that the expectation of excess can be really stressful. Do you find yourself feeling obliged to follow the crowd, piling your plate with food, and not wanting to upset anyone by failing to clear it? Or simply find yourself tempted by foods that aren’t around the rest of the year?

Here I just want to focus on one small thing that can reduce your post-Christmas feelings of regret. So that once the tree and the tinsel are packed away, you feel happy with how you ate during the festivities.

A simple idea

This idea is so simple.

For meals where you have the option, think “Small & Special”. Ask yourself what will really hit the spot, and have the best version of that you can afford.

This means you’ll be eating the things that will give you the greatest enjoyment.

Essentially this is quality over quantity, and the aim is peak pleasure. Far from Scroogily denying yourself, you’re looking to boost the joy you get from eating.

Small & Special might mean some weird combination of flavours that only you love! The fact that you’re going for what you love most, and choosing a small serving can be a lovely counterpoint to the overly large festive meals that are happening. And these smaller, special meals push the brain’s pleasure buttons because of how our psychology evolved….

• The peak-end rule

As I explain in my free 2022 Christmas eating ebook, Professor Daniel Kahneman describes how the overall rating of an experience we have had depends on the “peak-end” rule. How pleasurable something was, when we recall it, depends the level of pleasure at the best moment of the experience and the level of pleasure at the end of the experience. The duration of the overall experience has no effect whatsoever on ratings of total pleasure, so eating a lot of something mediocre doesn’t register much pleasure whereas having an intensely pleasurable experience, even if only quite brief, does.

So there’s a lot to be said for opting for small and special meals when you can. Look forward to them and remember them with pleasure. After all, the anticipation and the reflection are both sources of extra (calorie-free) pleasure. And enhance the Peak Effect by really savouring every bite.

• Taste-specific satiety

It may be helpful to remember that when you downsize the amount you eat, you’ll be keeping the tastiest part of the meal. That’s because our taste sensitivity reduces as we eat. The part you’re not having is the part that would have tasted less fabulous.

When you combine taste-specific satiety with the ‘end’ part of the Peak-End rule you can see that keeping eating to the point of meh-ness, means that the “End experience” is rather bland. Again detracting from how pleasurable the memory is.

Small & Special in 2024

Beyond Christmas, the S&S mantra is something you can use all year round, to reduce the amount you eat without reducing overall enjoyment. You can use it just for particular meals, or go the whole hog and use it as your watchword.

Download my free Christmas eating ebook

I mentioned it above, and here is the link again – the guide to the psychology of Christmas eating I wrote a year ago.

Looking forward to 2024

I am looking forward to creating more useful content for you on the psychology of eating, appetite and weight loss during the coming year.

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