Here's a random idea that just popped into my head: Eat dessert before your meal to eat less.

This is purely hypothesis, and I don't think it'd be a good idea for every meal (that's just asking for diabetes), but it might be worth a shot. I just ate a cookie before lunch today and it really killed my appetite. This resulted in me eating a surprisingly small lunch considering I didn't have breakfast today. Had I not eaten that cookie, I probably would have filled myself up on lunch, then fallen to my cravings and stuffed in a cookie afterwards anyway.

This all seems a pretty logical if you think about it. Dessert is usually that extra temptation at the end of your meal, but why wait 'til you're full to indulge if you know you're probably going to anyway? Indulge first. Get it over with. Then move on to finish as much of your main course as you can. I bet the second half of that steak is much easier to leave behind than that deep fried triple fudge cheesecake volcano that you can't wait to try.

A quick google search: There's a short 1962 Time article that seems to agree with me (although since I started watching Mad Men, I became keenly aware of everything wrong with '60s culture, so I wouldn't give this too much credit without some more investigation)