How to control your portions

Hopefully, by this point, you’ll have worked out your calorie allowance, you’ll know roughly what foods contain which macros and which foods are more/less dense.

Although calorie trackers are a massive help, allowing you to enter all the food you consume in a day and staying within your allowance, they can also be stressful to keep up with and can be a hassle to use. You also don’t want to rely on it for the rest of your life. Much like Slimming World/Weight Watchers etc. - you do not want to be on them for the rest of your life to be in control of your weight (no thanks!).

So, being able to judge your calorie intake by eye is rather more advantageous (but it does take practice), and here’s how:

There are a few easy and effective ways to be able to do so, and one of those methods uses your hands! Yes, that’s right, your hands. There are a few reasons as to why they’re so useful - They’re always with you (I would hope anyway!), and they’re the perfect portion size relative to the size of your body, so your hands are essentially your measuring cups. Trust me, it’ll become clear soon!

Here are some visual examples:

This information will come as a surprise for the majority of people, which may explain why you’re overweight or have gained weight (except for individuals with certain health issues) unless of course, you have unusually large hands in relation to your body!

With practice, you will be able to start eye-balling your portions and being able to judge how many calories a certain amount of food contains.

You will become familiar with the size of the food and be able to estimate its calorie content. For example, let's take a potato that is roughly the same size as your fist - you may want to weigh it initially to see how much it weighs and you can work out how many calories it contains by referring to the nutritional label on the back of the packaging.

Let’s say your chosen potato weighs 250g. You can then calculate how many calories it contains by using the information on the nutritional label.

Most food packaging will tell you its contents in a 100g serving AND a typical serving/portion. Always familiarise yourself with calorie contents based upon 100g as your actual food may not weigh the stated typical serving size. You’ve already weighed your potato out at 250g, but the example below shows “1 potato (approx 175g)” which would be a typical serving, so be aware which one you’re looking at. Here’s an example of a 100g versus one serving:

This image is the nutritional label of Tesco’s white potatoes. It states that 100g provides 79kcal. If your potato weighs 250g, simply multiply this by 2.5 and you have your answer (which is 197kcal). This rule applies to every other food and its packaging.

Let’s look at another popular food item and apply the same rules. Chicken. - One chicken breast is usually around the same size as the average person's palm (recommended portion, see above images). The below image has been taken from Tesco’s website of 2 chicken fillets and their nutritional and calorie content.

The pack contains 300g of chicken within 2 breasts, weighing 150g each (per portion/breast). So, in this case, you can refer to the portion guide IF you’re having one breast as your portion. If you’re intending on having 200g, then we can refer back to the 100g and simply multiply it by 2 which equates to 212kcal.

Pretty simple when you think of it in this way.

In some cases, you may not have more than a 100g serving. In these circumstances, you take the weight (let’s say it weighs 14g)and your calorie content per 100g is 262. Multiply 262 by 0.14 (14g) and you’ll have your answer = 37kcal.

This is especially important to remember when you consume calorie-dense foods

Please note: Always weigh your portions out as dry food when it comes to items such as pasta, rice, grains etc, as boiling will add water weight and they will also expand in size - take a handful of dry pasta, this is your recommended portion size, weigh it and cook it.

Not sure how to read the rest of the nutritional contents of food labels? We’ll cover this next time!

Myth: There are no such thing as zero calorie foods - every food item contains calories!

Truth: The only ingestible thing with zero calories is water. Adding anything else to plain water will contain calories.