Tips For Perfect Portion Sizes

"You can get fat eating healthy food."

Let that message sink in for a minute.

As much as you may have heard all about choosing the right foods for your diet, counting your calories, focusing on low carb, or low fat, or natural whole foods, none of this actually matters if you’re still eating too much food. Your body sees all food as a source of fuel, and while healthy foods may be far lower in calories than those junk foods, you can definitely still gain weight by eating too much.

You may be eating all the right foods, meticulously planning your meal times to a tee, focusing on fresh foods, natural produce and avoiding junk food like the plague. Yet something’s missing from your diet plant — portion sizes. Without planning the correct serving sizes, all your hard work could be completely going to waste.

You're not alone if you're struggling with portion sizes, but we're here to help. What tips do you need to know about portion sizes to take your dietary plans to the next level?

Your body runs off calories, and the three macronutrients — which are proteins, carbs and fat. Choosing the right types of these is certainly important for your general health and well-being, as well as avoiding disease and illness, optimizing your performance when exercising in the gym, and keeping you feeling fuller and reducing your cravings, but none of this matters if you’re over-consuming the foods.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a staunch vegan, zero carb dieter, organic eater, or any other diet under the sun, you need some form of portion control.

There are two methods of measuring your portion sizes and both work well, it just depends on what’s easiest for you to follow and stick to. The first method is the calorie counting method.

Counting Calories For Portion Control 

Counting calories appears to be seriously uncool in the nutrition industry at the moment. All the latest diets claim you don’t need to count them and point out the many flaws with calorie counting. However, while the calorie values listed on packaging and counting apps may not always be 100 percent right, it’s still an extremely accurate method, and far better than eating unlimited quantities.

When counting calories, you don’t need to aim for a certain amount of food per meal, rather a daily total of calories, or better still, a daily total for each of the three macronutrients. How you work this out depends on who you talk to, but the best approach is to use an Online calorie calculator or app to work out your basal metabolic rate (BMR) which is how many calories you need per day just to survive.

From here, work out your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) which factors in your activity levels.

Aim for around 1 gram of protein per pound of body-weight, then split the rest of your calories between carbs and fat.

From here, it’s simply a case of making sure all your meals over the day fit in with these guidelines.

The beauty of this method is that it’s accurate and allows you to vary the amounts you eat each meal. For instance, if you want a large serving of carbs at breakfast but don’t mind foregoing them at dinner, then go ahead. The same goes for protein and fat – those daily numbers are key, and it’s easy to calculate portion sizes using a set of digital kitchen scales. Once you’ve weighed your food, plug it into a calorie counting app, website or spreadsheet and work out your portion sizes from there.

The Eyeballing Method For Portion Control

If all that sounds just too technical, fear not, there is an alternative method of working out portion sizes.

The eyeballing, or guesstimating method works better for those who aren’t number-orientated, prefer to focus on single-ingredient foods, like to eat the same things regularly, or who are on the road or out a lot without access to scales for weighing ingredients.

You may have had the advice that your protein servings should be as big as a deck of carbs or that you need a fists-worth of grains to make a portion, but that doesn’t really get accurate enough and doesn’t allow for particular differences between men and women, or goals.

You can however use different parts of your hand to get a pretty good gauge of portion sizes.

Your palm will determine your protein portions, your fist will relate to veggies, your cupped hand for grains and your thumb for fattier foods.

• When it comes to protein in each meal:

men should have roughly two palms worth,

while women should opt for just one palm of meat, fish, eggs or dairy.

• For your veggies, it’s the same sort of deal.

Guys should look to have two servings of veggies, each roughly the size of their fist,

while women need to shoot for one fist of vegetables.

• You might have guess it, but it also works the same for higher carb items.

Men need two cupped hand fulls of carbs,

and women one.

This does vary a little though – if you’re looking to drop some fat, then you may want to decrease this slightly, or go for lower carb items. For instance, two cupped hand fulls of rice, quinoa or oats will have a fairly hefty carb count. While they may still be starches, root vegetables such as squash or Swede, along with low-sugar fruits like berries or apples, plus beans and pulses will all be slightly lower on the carbs. You can sub in extra green veggies for carbs too if you wish.

Finally, it’s two thumbs for men on the fats, and one thumb for women. These fat foods could be nuts, seeds, oils, or full fat dairy products like cheese or cream. Again, there’s some leeway with this. If you’re having a fattier protein source such as steak, chicken thighs or an oily fish like salmon, you might want to forego the extra fat if you’re on a weight loss kick.

This method is a lot easier to implement, but does require some self-control. Don’t for example, try to literally pile as much carbohydrate as you can into your cupped palms, in the hope of boosting your serving sizes. It can also make some meals difficult to plan. If you’re having a one-pot dish like a casserole, chili or pasta dish for example, it’s tougher to guesstimate portion sizes.

Both these methods work, provided you’re sensible with them and make adjustments to your diet depending on progress.