>>>>I was talking to a dietician Monday morning and she was surprisingly realistic. Anyway, knowing that I like meat and carbs, she said that the idea is to quarter your dinner plate. One quarter for meat, one quarter for carbs, and the other half for veggies. I said to her, "So what you're really telling me is that I need to buy bigger plates?"
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>>>I've alos heard that you should eat regularly. If you skip meals as a way of "losing weight" you body goes into starvation mode and starts hanging onto everything you eat and laying down fat.
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>>I've heard that too. I also asked her about the concept of eating slower so that the stomach has time to alert the brain that it's full, and she said that it's absolutely true. There is a time gap between your stomach being full and your brain finding out about it. If you eat fast, you tend to eat beyond being full.
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>>I always promise myself when I go to the Mandarin for dinner (an incredible 'all you can eat' Chinese restaurant) that I'll pace myself, but I've never been able to leave the place without pain.
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>It would be nice if there was one of those here. There are a number of Chinese buffets, but they all stink. Use mediocre ingredients and let the food sit in hot pans on the buffet line for hours, slowly losing touch with the food kingdom, and you can make a profit at $6.99 a head. One thing I miss about living in the city is there were loads of excellent Chinese, Thai, and Indian restaurants. Up here it's mostly chains.

The Mandarin is a chain too, but I've yet to find one that wasn't high quality. Here is a picture of a very small part of one of the restaurants (the food area). What you see there is one station. There are normally at least 6 stations not counting all the stations that line the walls and the hot food preparation area where you can get stuff as it's cooked.

http://www.mandarinbuffet.com/photos/7.html