What a portion really looks like on your plate

There is a version of nutrition where you weigh everything, log everything and know your numbers to the gram. I have lived in that version. I prepared for bodybuilding competitions, and for months at a time every gram was accounted for.

It works. It is also not a life, and it is not what I am going to ask of you.

What you need is not a scale on the counter forever. You need a reliable way to judge a portion by eye, so you can make the call at a friend's house, in a restaurant, and at seven on a Wednesday evening when you are tired.

Your hand is the measuring cup you never leave at home

Your hand is roughly proportional to you. A tall woman has a bigger hand and needs more food than a smaller woman does. That is exactly the property you want in a measuring tool.

• Protein: a palm. Thickness as well as width. Chicken, fish, beef, eggs, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, beans.
• Vegetables: a fist, and more than one is fine. This is the one thing almost nobody is overeating.
• Starchy carbohydrates: a cupped hand. Rice, pasta, potato, bread, oats.
• Fats: a thumb. Oil, butter, nut butter, cheese, nuts.

That is one meal. For most women, most of the time, one palm, one or two fists, one cupped hand and a thumb is a plate that works.

Notice what is not in that list. No food is banned. Nothing has to be weighed. And it travels with you, which a kitchen scale does not.

The plate version, if you would rather look than count

Same idea, done by area. Half the plate vegetables. A quarter protein. A quarter starchy carbohydrate. A thumb of fat somewhere, usually in the cooking.

If you eat out of a bowl the same proportions still apply, they are just harder to see, which is why I ask a lot of women to use a plate for the first few weeks. Not forever. Only long enough for your eye to learn it.

Where portions actually go wrong

The food you never put on a plate

Nothing eaten standing at the counter feels like a portion. The piece of cheese while you cook. The last of the children's dinner. The handful from the bag on the way past.

Individually trivial, and together very often the whole difference. I am not asking you to stop. I am asking you to notice, for one week.

Restaurants

A restaurant portion is frequently two of yours, and it is built that way on purpose. That is not a trap, it is the business.

Two things that work. Decide before the food arrives that half of it is going home. Or order a protein and a vegetable side instead of a dish where the carbohydrate is the entire plate. Neither one requires you to explain yourself to anybody at the table.

Anything you drink

A latte, a juice, a glass of wine and a smoothie all pass through without registering as a portion. They still count. This is the single most common thing I find when a woman tells me she is eating almost nothing and nothing is changing.

Do you ever need a scale?

Sometimes. Briefly. As a teaching tool.

If you genuinely cannot picture what a hundred grams of cooked rice looks like, weigh it once. Look at it, on your own plate, in your own kitchen. Then put the scale away. You are calibrating your eye, not signing up to weigh your food for the rest of your life.

A plan tells you the number. An education means you can still make the call when the number is not there.

What to do this week

1. Use a plate for your main meal every day and set it out to the hand sizes above.
2. Put the vegetables on first, before you decide anything else.
3. Notice the food you eat without plating it. Only notice it.
4. Weigh exactly one thing you eat often, once, and then stop.

Give that a week and you will start seeing portions instead of guessing at them. That is a skill, and once you have it nobody can take it back off you.