What is the "Mighty Bowl"? Quite simply put, it's a nice large bowl you will eat most of your meals out of.
Stop eating out of small bowls and from flat dinner plates! I want you to choose an over-sized microwave-safe bowl you can fill to the brim with obnoxious amounts of food. Nothing elaborate; I recommend a 1.5 quart or 1.5 liter mixing bowl made by Pyrex or Anchor Hocking, something like that. It should look vaguely like this:
I'm going to wager you already have one of these in your kitchen cupboards somewhere. Probably several. This bowl will be your one-size-fits-all method of food delivery. You can fill it with 3-5 times more than a normal cereal bowl will hold. You can fill it with oatmeal, you can stuff it full of Mac-&-Cheese or chili & rice; whatever you eat, fill up this bucket and you won't have to go back for seconds. It's like a feeding-trough.
"Okay, so this is just another way of saying EAT MORE?"
Heck yes, it is! But it works, and I'll explain why. Here's the science behind this: You will eat more from a larger container. This has been established through various studies. You are much more likely to continue grazing if there's still food to eat. Here's a way-too-long excerpt (but it will totally explain this phenomenon) from the book SWITCH - How to Change Things When Change is Hard:
One Saturday in 2000, some unsuspecting moviegoers showed up at a suburban theater in Chicago to catch a 1:05 p.m. matinee of Mel Gibson's action flick Payback. They were handed a soft drink and a free bucket of popcorn and were asked to stick around after the movie to answer a few questions about the concession stand. These movie fans were unwitting participants in a study of irrational eating behavior.
There was something unusual about the popcorn they received. It was wretched. In fact, it had been carefully engineered to be wretched. It had been popped five days earlier and was so stale that it squeaked when you ate it. One moviegoer later compared it to Styrofoam packing peanuts, and two others, forgetting that they'd received the popcorn for free, demanded their money back.
Some of them got their free popcorn in a medium-size bucket, and others got a large bucket - the sort of huge tub that looks like it might once have been an above-ground swimming pool. Every person got a bucket so there'd be no need to share. The researchers responsible for the study were interested in a simple question: Would the people with bigger buckets eat more?
Both buckets were so big that none of the moviegoers could finish their individual portions. So the actual research question was a bit more specific: Would somebody with a larger inexhaustible supply of popcorn eat more than someone with a smaller inexhaustible supply?
The sneaky researchers weighed the buckets before and after the movie, so they were able to measure precisely how much popcorn each person ate. The results were stunning: People with the large buckets ate 53 percent more popcorn than the people with the medium size. That's the equivalent of 173 more calories and approximately 21 extra hand-dips into the bucket.
Brian Wansink, the author of the study, runs the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, and he described the results in his book Mindless Eating: "We've run other popcorn studies, and the results were always the same, however we tweaked the details. It didn't matter if our moviegoers were in Pennsylvania, Illinois, or Iowa, and it didn't matter what kind of movie was showing; all of our popcorn studies led to the same conclusion. People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period."
No other theory explains the behavior. These people weren't eating for pleasure. (The popcorn was so stale it squeaked!) They weren't driven by a desire to finish their portion. (Both buckets were too big to finish.) It didn't matter whether they were hungry or full. The equation is unyielding: Bigger container = more eating.
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It's so much easier to sit on the couch with a huge bowl of food instead of a plate. There's a lot to be said for "the Grazing method" (it's not atypical for me to take 45 minutes to eat a meal sometimes!) You can always pop it into the microwave halfway through to re-heat food if you need to; you can also cover it and toss it into the fridge if you just can't finish. But learn to settle in with a nice large bowl of food and tuck into it.
Eating can definitely be a meditation of sorts, but meals don't always require mindfulness. "Zoning off" while eating, in the presence of a distraction, is often a sure-fire way to inevitably eat more. Again, this is a habit many people do accidentally during the process of (unknowingly!) gaining weight; but we can employ this technique as an active strategy for bulking up, as it will make eating easier for the hard-gainer as well.
There's really only so much more I can add to this post. "Eating More" always comes down to . . . finding a way to eat more. Hopefully this is one more tool you can add to your box of tricks to get more food down. Get a bigger container for food, fill it up with more than you think you can eat, take your time, and keep eating!
(Here's what a fully-loaded "Mighty Bowl" could look like: 1200 Calories of Chicken & Rice!)
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Eating More Involves Eating More,
There's No Other Way Around It.
So . . . find a way to eat more!
BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO DAMN SKINNY!
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