I get a lot of offers to review products, but I turn most of them down because they aren’t something that I would use. However, this one caught my eye because it is a product that encompasses things that I already do. The SlimPlate system is basically a portion control system to use at home (or out if you want). You eat 3 meals a day and 2 snacks using these cups/plates/bowls.
It comes with 13 pieces plus an instruction booklet, including the meal division plates, bowls, mugs and portion cutters. The dishware seems comparable to Corelle ware and it is dishwasher safe. There are 4 lunch/dinner plates, which have marked sections for protein (orange), veggies (green), and starches (blue).
You follow a 4 month plan with these plates. You go through the Inspired, Savvy, Master and Maintenance stages, each lasting 1 month (well, maintenance forever, right?). Basically you portion out your food into the designated wedges without having to count calories or measure foods. The plan is designed starting more lower carb with the Inspired stage. Your dinner plate is divided into 2 sections instead of 3 like the others. Here is an example of a typical Inspire meal:
As you progress each month, you use the plates with a larger blue wedge and the equally portioned plate is maintenance. Now if you have a mixed dish, say Chinese takeout, you can use a divided plate and would put the rice/noodles in the blue section and then the veggie/protein mix in the other sections, trying to keep it even. A little awkward, but it does control how much you are eating.
Women are supposed to stay on the inside of the colored lines and men can go to the outside of the colored lines. So basically – no food touching for women 😀 You all know how I feel about food touching, too.
There are 2 bowls. One is for soups/cold cereal. Personally, I think this bowl is a bit big for breakfast cereal as you can fit a lot in there. Here is an example of my normal bowl of banana custard oats in this bowl.
The small snack bowl is for fruit (as seen in the dinner photo above) or if you want a snack of something like potato chips or a scoop of ice cream, you can use this bowl.
The 2 mugs are for hot and cold beverages. You can fill these up once per day with a beverage of choice, so if you want alcohol, juice or hot cocoa, you can have them. This doesn’t work for me and my lattes – not big enough LOL! However, the milk portion of my latte actually measures out into the cold cup.
The breakfast plate has markings of where your food should fit.
For example, my banana bread breakfast pudding actually fits neatly onto one of the circles for a waffle:
The cutters are designed to portion out foods like bagels, muffins, sandwiches (because round sandwiches are fun!), pancakes or waffles.
They correspond to the circles on the breakfast plate. These cutters also can be taken out to eat. Here is an example of a Bagel Wednesday and the size of the cutters with breakfast.
The bagel is okay, probably about the size of a Lender’s bagel? The muffin cutter is really tiny. 2 inches across. You would take this cutter and push it down through the muffin pictured below.
The muffin above is not that big on its own for breakfast and cutting out that portion would be very small, like a mini muffin. Honestly, I don’t eat muffins that often (this is John’s muffin) and I wouldn’t bother with a portion this small 😀 The muffin cutter can also be used to cut a dessert portion of something, like 2 cookies.
Now the website says that people on average follow the system 70% of the time and see success. That seems a low percentage to me to see success, but who knows? I do like that you aren’t expected to be perfect.
You can also join free web classes for the SlimPlate system. They start once a month. This will give tips and advice on using the system. You can sign up for this to see if the system is something you are interested in purchasing as well. There also is an iphone app available.
What I like about this is that you eat as you normally do, but just watching portions. Of course, they do give you guidelines on how to eat better, but even just using the plates for portion sizes really is eye opening to see how much you are eating. The nice thing is that you don’t have to buy any special food and you can eat what your family eats.
The system costs $99. That’s not bad for all the items plus the web classes. Plus, the people at SlimPlate also are offering a coupon for readers. The coupon code for is FINDINGRADIANCE.This will provide $5 off for the kit (not the installment plan).
FTC disclaimer: I was provided the SlimPlate system for free to review. All opinions are my own and I was not compensated in any other way.