Hot New Diet: Cutting Your Food Into Little Pieces?

Research Suggests It Will Help You Lose Weight

Remember that scene in Clueless, where Cher (Alicia Silverstone) tries to convince her BFF Dionne (Stacey Dash) that cutting her food into tiny little pieces will help her lose weight? Well, turns out Cher's weight management tip wasn't so clueless after all.

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According to a new study (thanks to MSN.com for the heads up) presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (yeah, we checked, it's a real thing), scientists have found that both animals and humans "fool" themselves into thinking they're full if they eat smaller portion sizes.

So, don't eat a whole bagel or a whole hot dog … chop them up into small pieces, and the fact that you're eating more pieces of food is likely to make you feel like you've eaten more food, which will make you feel fuller.

Scientists conducted research on both humans and rats to get the results, with the biggest study involving a group of 301 college students.

All the students were given a bagel, with some of them given an uncut bagel, and others given a bagel that had been cut into quarters. After they ate the bagel, they were told they could then eat as much as they wanted from a free lunch.

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The students who had received the whole bagel ate more calories from the lunch; the students who had received the quartered bagel ate fewer calories from the lunch.

The conclusion from the lead author of the research report: "Cutting up energy-dense meal foods into smaller pieces may be beneficial to dieters who wish to make their meal more satiating while also maintaining portion control."

Just like Cher suggested …