Your Hand-held Guide to Portion Sizing

For many people, Calorie counting can be challenging. Some may not have the tools available to identify the Calories in everything they eat. Others may not have the time to look it up. In some cases, you may normally count your Calories, but find yourself in a situation where you can't...maybe you're at a restaurant or at someone's home for dinner. You don't always know everything that goes into preparing food when you are not the one preparing it.

If you find that you are in a situation where counting your Calories is not really an option, there are other methods at your disposal. The one we're going to cover here today is less accurate than strict Calorie counting, but has a few other advantages. First, it is portable. You don't need any tools other than your own hand. Second, it's scalable. In other words, a larger person will normally need larger portions and this method handles that naturally.

How this works is pretty simple. Your hands will be used to determine portion sizes for different types of foods at any given meal. Your protein will be determined by the size of your palm, vegetable portions are measured by the size of your fist, fats are based on your thumb and carbohydrates will be determined by the size of your cupped hand.

Your proteins, of course, will be meat or chicken, fish, eggs, dairy or beans. For the average male, you will want to eat about 6-8 palm-sized portions of protein per day. The average female will consume roughly 4-6 palms of protein per day. However you decide to break that up over the course of the day is largely up to you. In a future article, we will cover optimum times for eating certain types of food, but in general, these guidelines should be sufficient for most people.

Vegetables include the obvious things such as broccoli, spinach, carrots and salads, just to name a few. When putting vegetables on your plate, males will take 6-8 fists of vegetables throughout the day and females will focus on 4-6 fists of vegetables. This does not include fruits as those will be included in the carbohydrate portion. Not only will this be a nutrient-dense section of your plate, but it will also typically be where you get most of your fiber.

Fats will include such things as nuts, oils, butter, nut butters or seeds. If you are an average male, you want to have 6-8 thumb-sized portions of fat-dense foods per day. For the average female, shoot for 4-6 thumb-sized portions per day. You may be noticing a pattern by now.

Grains, starches and fruits are the types of foods that make up the carbohydrates in your meal. For these, in case you haven't figured it out already, will be measured with your cupped hands. Males will consume 6-8 cupped handfuls of these foods per day and females will take in 4-6 cupped handfuls.

Notice, that all of these portion sizes are for "average" males and females. However, you might be wondering how you can further tailor these things to be more specific for your own needs. Not to worry. While this is a good foundation, in a future article we will go over how to make adjustments based on things like your body-type. So, if you are a classic "ectomorph" or "mesomorph" or "endomorph," we will cover how to dial in these portion sizes. And, yes, we will go over what these body-types are for anyone who has never heard of these terms before.

Until next time...