Micro Dieting

Tiny meals for tiny mouths.

Jon Arbuckle: Here, Garfield, have some food. According to your diet, you get this.
Garfield: That's it? That's all, just one scraggly piece of lettuce?
Jon: Oh, I'm sorry, Garfield. That's not what you get. (tears the lettuce in two) You get HALF a leaf of lettuce.

— Garfield's Thanksgiving

The opposite of the Big Eater, this trope is when people eat ridiculously tiny portions of food for their entire meals, like a single leaf of lettuce, one cube of cheese, or one small strawberry. (Tiny utensils, napkin, and table are optional.) Some of the reasons why they might do so:

• They're on a diet. Fewer calories = faster weight loss!
• They're dining at one of those fancy restaurants that serves tiny meals because Haute Cuisine Is Weird.
• They have a small stomach.
• They're simply an eccentric who prefers their meals to be in small portions.
• They don't have enough money for more food.

While this is usually a Comedy Trope, the "eating tiny portions to lose weight" variation is pretty easy to deconstruct. Less food and less calories might help you lose weight, but you need at least some substantial calories to be able to function. The dieter is likely to struggle with the sudden and extreme hunger and quit after a few days, tops, after realizing how hungry they are. But if they don't quit, it can be Played for Drama as they reach their target weight...and keep going and going, eating less and less, unable to bring themselves to eat normally-sized portions.

Even if you are dieting, please Do Not Try This at Home for a sustained period of time without doing your research and possibly consulting a doctor, nutritionist, dietician, fitness trainer, etc. You could hurt yourself if you suddenly go on a starvation-level diet without knowing what you are doing.

Related tropes:

• Diet Episode: Somebody goes on a diet, which can involve micro-dieting.
• Food Pills: An entire meal in one convenient pill.
• Haute Cuisine Is Weird: In the case of the "fancy restaurant serves ridiculously tiny food" variation.
• Missed Meal Aesop: Don't skip meals, kids!
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: Somebody is so upset that they lose their appetite.
• Weight Loss Horror: Weight loss, voluntary or not, goes horribly wrong.
• Weight Loss Salad: Instead of eating very little food to lose weight, eat only vegetables (or combine them and eat only tiny portions of vegetables).
• Weight Woe: Someone struggles with their weight, and may eat tiny portions in hopes of dropping some pounds.

Contrast with:

• Giant Food / Mountain of Food: Don't eat small, eat big!
• Nutritional Nightmare: ...And pack on those calories while you're at it!

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Asterix:
  • Subverted in Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield. At the traditional end-of-story banquet, Obelix says he's decided to alter his diet and produces a tiny biscuit. When Asterix sarcastically asks if he's going to eat anything with it, Obelix says yes: a (whole, roasted) boar.
  • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, one man who loves fasting once asks for "one egg"... referring to caviar.
• Monica's Gang: In "Mãe de Dieta" ("Mom on a Diet"), Ms. Five forces the family to support her new dietary regime, which consists of meals such as a single piece of lettuce for lunch or two stalks of celery for dinner. Although she manages to accomplish her goal of slimming down, she is horrified when she realizes her husband and son have gotten thin to the point of being clinically ill. This causes her to abandon her diet, restoring the status quo.

Comic Strips

• Garfield: In some strips, Garfield is given tiny amounts of food for his diets, such as a single lettuce leaf.
  Garfield: I don't think I can eat all of my lettuce leaf. (right in Jon's face) BECAUSE I'M PLANNING TO PASS OUT FROM HUNGER!

Films — Animated

• Fun and Fancy Free has Mickey, Goofy, and Donald engage in this out of necessity — because Willie the Giant stole the singing harp that provides prosperity to the land, reducing the lush place to a barren desert, they're completely out of food except for a single bean and a single slice of bread, which have to be divided three ways. By the time the bread slice has been sliced again and again to share among them, the slices are thin enough to be transparent.
• Kung Fu Panda: Discussed. Tigress comments that the Dragon Warrior is said to be able to survive for months on the dew of a single ginkgo leaf and the energy of the universe.
  Po: I guess my body doesn't know it's the Dragon Warrior yet. Gonna need a lot more than dew and universe juice.
• Invoked for Black Comedy in A Very Blue Beard. Bluebeard's second wife Lilianna forces what she views as a healthy lifestyle on her husband, and it includes forbidding him to eat meat and pastry and limiting himself to "one spoon of oil a day, a minimum of salts" (although it's ambiguous whether she means one spoon of some medicinal oil in addition to something else or one spoon of oil in total). Later, she is shown to stop Bluebeard from eating an apple. He gets so exhausted from starvation and the constant physical exercise that he can't even get on a horse, and it eventually drives him to poison Lilianna.
• In Zootopia, Nick and Judy are invited to the wedding of Mr. Big's daughter Fru Fru, where the bride, groom, family members, and guests are all shrews. Nick picks up a plate with a shrew-sized slice of wedding cake and takes a forkful out of it gracefully.

Films — Live-Action

• The Devil Wears Prada: At one point Emily talks about the newest diet she's on, which apparently involves basically fasting until you can't stand it anymore and then eating a tiny piece of cheese to take the edge off.

Literature

• Angela Nicely: In "Healthy Holiday", Mrs. Nicely discovers she can no longer fit into a dress, fears that it's because she gained weight, and goes to a weight loss spa with her daughter Angela. However, both of them have a horrible time, with one of the reasons being that the spa only serves tiny amounts of food.
• A variation in Dear Dumb Diary. While Jamie's mom is usually a horrible cook, she can make incredibly delicious appetizers, with her daughter commenting, "It's like she'd be a great cook if she only had to prepare meals for Barbies."
• Geronimo Stilton: In "A Cheese-Colored Camper," William Shortpaws' personal chef, Tina Spicytail, decides he needs to lose weight and only serves him an olive and a single piece of lettuce for dinner. At the same time, she decides Geronimo needs to gain weight and piles his plate with enough food for a dozen mice. Neither of them are happy with the arrangement.
• Good Omens: Raven Sable, a.k.a. Famine, keeps his influence in the world by encouraging humans towards disordered eating, including publishing a diet book called Starve Yourself Thin and inventing nouvelle cuisine.
• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Dudley is forced to go on a diet like this, which Aunt Petunia decides the whole family will follow. Breakfast consists of her cutting a single grapefruit into fourths and passing one quarter to each member of the family. Harry is given the smallest quarter. Dudley greedily steals Uncle Vernon's grapefruit quarter.
• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle: In the first book's "The Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker Cure", a boy named Allen starts cutting his food into tiny bits and eating the entire thing incredibly slowly, claiming he'll choke if he eats any bigger or faster; his parents, despite thinking this is ridiculous, can't help but be concerned about his behavior, and his mother goes to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle for help. She's supplied with progressively smaller dishes for her son to use until Allen, who's now eating so little that he barely has the energy to even move, agrees to start eating progressively larger portions until he's back to normal so he can be healthy again.
• Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty:
  • In "Thumbelina's Get-Tiny Cleanse—Tested", Miss Muffet tries a diet consisting of rose petals, pine needles, dew, mist, and dandelion fluff. She shrinks so small that she gets wrapped up and eaten by a spider.
  • In "Blow Your House In", a female basketball player becomes obsessed with her weight, quits the sport and starts developing anorexia.
    At lunch she swirled a teeny spoon in yogurt
    that never touched her lips and said
    she'd decided to quit chasing a stupid ball.
• The Screwtape Letters presents the argument that eating tiny portions can paradoxically be a manifestation of overwhelming gluttony. As Screwtape explains, gluttony isn't just overeating but includes any time someone is controlled by their appetite (or lack thereof) until they don't care how much they bother others. His prime example of this is The Patient's Mother. We're not told exactly how small her preferred portions are, just that no matter how much she's served, she'll protest that it's too much and demand that half or even two-thirds of it be taken away. She's a pain to servants and waitstaff wherever she goes, and her own son hates eating with her because she makes such a scene, though he's too polite to ever say so.
• In Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, Yumi's status as a yoki-hijo affords her a large variety of foods, but she's only allowed a few bites per meal, as everything has to be fed to her by attendants and her duties give her an absurdly tight schedule.

Live-Action TV

• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In "Fancy Brugdom", Terry, Gina, and Amy are all dieting.^note Not because any of them are out of shape, mind you. Terry's wife is dieting, so Terry's following the diet as well to support her—and Gina and Amy are going along to support Terry. It's a "very scientific" diet with individually packaged portions delivered straight to them for every meal, all of them ridiculously tiny. For example, at breakfast, each of them gets a single orange wedge, three cashews, and a solitary grape. They try to insist these meals are more than enough for them—then start licking the inside of the food bags, in hopes of getting the last remaining "food molecules" stuck inside. By the end of the day, all three of them fall off the wagon and eat a properly-sized meal.
• Clarice: Catherine Martin, the Buffalo Bill victim that Clarice rescued in Silence of the Lambs, has become a severe anorexic as a result of the trauma she suffered. When Clarice is summoned to have dinner with the Martins (as Ruth Martin, Catherine's mother, is Clarice's new boss), Catherine eats a single bite of yogurt before declaring that she's full.
• Crash Landing on You: Se-ri has been nicknamed "Picky Princess" for being a picky eater.
  Unless the food is really good, I can't have more than three bites otherwise.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In "The Brute Man", the pre-film short "The Chicken of Tomorrow" includes a scene of someone carving slices of breast meat from a cooked chicken. Mike and the Bots crack several jokes about how ridiculously thin these slices are, calling it "Chicken sliced to the width of one electron," and concluding that these must be portions for supermodels.
• In Red Dwarf, after a day of slaving away, Queeg permits Lister... a pea on toast. Unfortunately He loses the pea.

Myth & Religion

• Many Christian ascetics fast extremely strictly (a lot more strictly than the general fasting rules advise). For example, St. Macarius of Alexandria only consumed a loaf of bread and a little water per day for three years. However, practically every book on ascetic life (among the newest examples — the books by St. Paisios of Mount Athos) warns people against loading such extreme duties upon themselves without consulting anyone. St. Paisios recounts cases from his own experience when eager newbies began to fast in the style of experienced ascetics, couldn't endure the hunger, and, predictably, soon gave up fasting altogether.

Video Games

• Pokémon:
  • Meditite is a Fighting-type Pokémon that puts itself through daily physical training, only eating one berry a day and nothing else.
  • In Pokémon Masters, Maylene tries to copy her Meditite's training regimen, which includes the one-berry diet in addition to sleeping for one hour and meditating for 15 hours. After talking with the player, she changes her mind and decides to do some training that's more suited for humans than Pokémon.

Web Animation

• Teen Girl Squad: Exaggerated in Issue 10. At lunchtime, Cheerleader declares that the girls should get ready to eat "NO FOOD!!" with So and So adding that "eating lunch is for weirdos." The Ugly One then sidles up carrying a tray piled high with corn kernels, declaring that "it's Corn and Corn Alone Day!"
• Two More Eggs: In the episode "World's Best: Tiny Pies", the two protagonists get roped into making tiny pies for an upper-crust party. They try to bake pies the size of cupcakes, but they invent an absurd recipe and end up with a black, tarry mess instead. Then they try to apologize, but the party guests look at the empty baking sheet and mistake it for a batch of microscopic pies and praise the duo for their culinary genius. The duo decide not to correct them.

Webcomics

• Team Fortress 2: In "Unhappy Returns," when Spy and Scout are in jail, Spy takes out several of his false teeth and removes from them a tiny tablecloth, bottle and glass of wine, candelabra, fork, knife, and miniature farm-raised Cornish game hen. He explains to Scout that he's doing this because the prison food is spiked with anti-psychotics and muscle relaxants, and he'd like to keep his mental faculties intact.

Websites

• Neopets:
  • The Healthy Food item Thimble of Soup has the description "It's the perfect portion if you are a Petpet..."
  • The Space Food item Dehydrated Ice Cream is a tiny solidified cube of Neapolitan ice cream that is said to be good for those who hate how messy regular ice cream is.
  • The Tyrannian Food item The Tiny Omelette has the description "When you want to eat an omelette the size of a snack."

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Subverted in "The Diet" when Richard, attempting to diet, says he read that he'll eat less if he uses tiny plates. He sits down to dinner with a single lettuce leaf on a tiny plate...only to reveal that the entire dinner table is covered in tiny plates holding all sorts of food. As Gumball tells him, this trope only works if you have one plate.
• Classic Disney Shorts:
  • In "The Trial of Donald Duck", Donald enters a fancy restaurant and asks for a small cup of coffee. He is given a single drop of coffee in a thimble-sized cup. Even worse, they charged him $15 for it.
  • In "Mickey's Christmas Carol", the Cratchits have little more than a tiny little turkey for Christmas dinner due to their poverty. Tiny Tim apparently doesn't know any different, sincerely declaring, "Oh my, look at all the wonderful things to eat! We must thank Mr. Scrooge."
• Color Classics: In "Somewhere in Dreamland," an impoverished mother breaks a piece of hard bread in half, giving one to each of her two children. After eating this tiny portion, the son complains that he's still hungry. Having no more food to give him, the mother just cries, and the son comforts her by pretending that he didn't really mean it.
• Der Fuehrer's Face: Due to the wartime-induced poverty of Nutzi Land, Donald's breakfast consists of a single slice of bread from a loaf that seems to be made of wood, water flavored with a single precious coffee bean he keeps tied to a string and locked in a safe, and a perfume of "Aroma de Bacon and Eggs".
• In "Garfield's Thanksgiving", the vet puts Garfield on a severe diet the day before Thanksgiving that includes getting half a leaf of lettuce to eat for lunch.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Haute Cuisine Is Weird variation with small portions of fancy food has appeared a few times.
  • In "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", young Applejack goes to live with her aunt and uncle in Manehattan to be a high society pony. When she goes to a fancy dinner with them, she’s served a tiny orange kernel of something in brown sauce and a sprig of wheat. She finds this disappointing, as she is used to eating a lot after working hard on her family's farm.
  • In "Spice Up Your Life", Rarity and Pinkie Pie discover that all the restaurants on Restaurant Row serve bland food in very small portions. This is to cater to the tastes of restaurant critic Zesty Gourmand, who prefers food prepared in that style and will not give any restaurant a three-hoof rating without it.
• The OWCA Files: At one point, Professor Parenthesis notes that he’s getting hungry, so he has a drop of liquid from an eyedropper, after which he declares he couldn’t eat another bite. This foreshadows that he’s actually a flea in a Mobile-Suit Human.
• Rocko's Modern Life: On one episode, Bev Bighead puts Ed on a diet and serves him cottage cheese for breakfast — a single curd of cottage cheese. Later, she rewards him with a double portion.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Entrapta, eccentric that she is, exclusively eats food in comically tiny portions, although it's not dieting so much as a preference. She just eats several tiny meals to compensate.
• The Simpsons: Played for Drama in "Sleeping with the Enemy" where Lisa thinks she's fat because Sherry and Terri sang that she had a "big butt" on the playground. She doesn't want to eat more than a tiny bite of carrot.

Real Life

• Spanish tapas bars and restaurants specialize in serving exclusively small appetizers.
• If someone really is eating like this both regularly and voluntarily, it’s no joke — they may be suffering from an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder) and they need to see a doctor ASAP.
• This review of the restaurant Bros (in Lecce, Italy) went viral in 2021, calling it "The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever". Aside from the restaurant running afoul of every other Haute Cuisine Is Weird stereotype, the review particularly called them out for how insubstantial the servings were. The most filling course of the evening consisted of six noodles and a single slice of bread. Other courses included: a paper-thin fish cracker, a tablespoon of crab meat, a sliver of oyster loaf ("that tasted like Newark airport"), a teaspoon of olive-flavored ice cream, a plate of sauce with droplets of "meat molecule"-infused gelée, one reconstituted orange slice with the rest of the orange as garnish (the author was scolded for attempting to eat the rest of the orange), a single cuttlefish-flavored marshmallow, and something called "frozen air" that literally melted before anyone could eat it. The entire meal ran for 27 courses, and everyone at the table was still starving when it was over.
  It wasn't dinner. It was just dinner theater.
  No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean — dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett's eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.
• Communion is a Catholic ritual that involves drinking a small glass of wine and eating a small, unleavened wafer called a host to represent the blood and body of Jesus Christ.

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