Smallest salad wins in friendly food battle

By Rory Evans

updated 1:21 p.m. ET April 6, 2008

Dinner among female friends can often play out like a game of Texas Hold 'em. One woman places an order — grilled chicken salad, dressing on the side. There is a pause. All eyes shift to the woman next to her, suspense building as she carefully weighs her next move. Will she see her? Will she raise her? Another grilled chicken salad it is! And so it goes around the rest of the table until it's clear they are four of a kind.

A group of women ordering the same meal seems innocent enough — unremarkable, even — but there's often something far more complicated lurking beneath the surface. "Women are amazingly accurate at knowing how much other women around them eat," says Patricia Pliner, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. "Whether their friends polish off their plates has a powerful effect on what they eat." This need to consume no less or no more than the next girl is almost visceral — and many who experience it would sooner admit to a cocaine habit than a competitive-eating one.

As with many female insecurities, cultural standards are at least partly to blame. Eating a lot alone is one thing, but doing so in public, in the presence of thin friends, can make you feel as if you've fallen down on the job of being an American woman, somehow punking out on the part of the social contract that suggests dieting makes you ladylike. One of Pliner's studies actually proved this: Test subjects read phony food diaries — some depicted women who ate small meals, while others were about women who ate larger meals. The small eaters were perceived to be more feminine, more concerned about appearance, and better-looking than the larger eaters.

On the one hand, this is pretty maddening information (can't a woman order a double cheeseburger with impunity?). But on the other, given these findings, can women really be blamed for not wanting to eat a lot in public? Consider, for instance, two recent side-by-side entries on the "Gawker Stalker" celebrity sightings section of gawker.com, a media Web site: On the left was a caption about "Saturday Night Live's" Will Forte, "looking all scruffy (and dare I say hot?) with his brother eating lunch at Chino's." What was he eating? How was he eating it? Not germane. And on the right was an entry about publicist Lizzie Grubman dining at Da Silvano: "She didn't order any appetizer and was picking at her seared tuna, wouldn't touch the potatoes on the plate."

But maybe the best — albeit a little arcane — anecdotal evidence of why women might be justified in not eating a lot when in a group setting is the idiomatic expression "old maid's portion" — meaning that last slice of birthday cake, the final scoop of ice cream in the carton — suggesting that she who dares to help herself is damned to a life alone. (But hey, if you're really hankering for that remaining handful of French fries, by all means, go ahead...and have yourself a long life cozying up to your Sudoku activity books, a dozen or so rescue cats, and, as your eyesight fails, a stray raccoon.)

Image over hunger pangs
Intrigued by this phenomenon, Pliner recently turned her attention to the rivalry that seeps into social dining. The research showed that people tend to match their intake to that of whomever they're eating with, and women in particular tend to eat the least when around other women — especially when they want to make a good impression. Evidently, image control trumps hunger pangs, since yet another study showed that even after being deprived of food for more than 24 hours, people consumed only as much as a "minimally eating" friend, because external and social influences have more impact than the body's internal signals to eat. "I have two friends I meet for brunch sometimes," says Kim*, a 24-year-old stylist. "I always walk into the restaurant starving, ready to order pancakes. But as soon as they order their egg whites, I sell out and order egg whites, too. I don't want to seem like the fatty."

The exception to the rule is when people are dining with six or more close friends or family members. A study found that people consume 75 percent more in those situations — and it's no coincidence that it happens when they're in the presence of those they feel completely comfortable around and don't believe will judge them.

Not surprising, since eating in public tends to be as much an exercise in saving face as in saving waist. "Some women want to give the impression that they are 'in charge' of their diets or 'in control' of their eating," says Susan Bowerman, assistant director of the Center for Human Nutrition at UCLA. (Admit it: How many blame-the-victim snap judgments have you made when you've spotted a heavy woman digging in to an ice-cream sundae at a restaurant?)

A funny thing happens, though, when you deny your hunger while out with friends: You might come home and ransack the cupboards, empty a bag of tortilla chips, and, still hungry, polish off a square of semisweet baker's chocolate. "When my clients restrict their food intake to appear strong in front of a dining partner, they often admit to raiding the kitchen later," says Bowerman. Dollars to doughnuts, "they end up eating more calories than if they'd ordered what they really wanted." As common as this might be, it's detrimental nonetheless: "Even though some women think the two [eating styles] 'balance' one another, it's a disorganized pattern of eating and isn't likely to lead to long-term weight maintenance."

Even the thin and glamorous can get sucked into this kind of behavior. Sarah*, a stunning 32-year-old fashion editor, boarded an overnight flight to Milan and found herself seated next to a woman she knew, "a gorgeous public relations director at a fashion house." When their food arrived — bear in mind, this was an airline meal, not exactly Grendel's feast — "even though I was hungry, I went into complete paranoia and didn't touch my plate, because she wasn't eating and I didn't want to stuff my face in front of her," Sarah says. Only later did she find out that her seatmate skipped dinner because she had been following Sarah's cues. "We were both conscious of each other," Sarah says now.

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