This Chart Shows You How to Evaluate Food Portions by Eye.
When you’re tracking calories, serving size can be tricky, especially if you’re eating out. While some restaurants post food information online, most do not. Here’s how to make sure your food diary doesn’t miss.
First, don’t worry. Dieters often think that their plan is disrupted just because they don’t know the exact content of what they are eating. When it comes to tracking calories, some information is better than nothing, and that’s okay if you don’t do it all the time. Here, perfection is the enemy of good , and it is much better to be consistent than sometimes perfect.
Second, you can use known food sizes to approximate what you are eating.
The McKinley Health Center has an excellent guide with many examples – it is a little out of date, but the information is still up to date. Here’s an example of meat:
| MEAT, POULTRY, FISH, DRY BEANS, EGGS and NUTS | |
| 2 tablespoons of peanut butter equals 1 ounce. meat | the size of a ping pong ball |
| 1 tablespoon peanut butter | thumb tip size * |
| 100 grams of cooked meat, fish, poultry | the size of a palm, deck of cards or cassette |
| 100 grams of fried / baked fish | this is the size of the checkbook |
| 30 grams of boiled chicken | the size of a chicken leg and thigh or breast |
This helps to select dishes in which each food group can be “divided”. For example, steak and potatoes will be much easier to evaluate than spaghetti and meatballs. Once you have a general idea of the composition of your food, you can connect it to your favorite food tracker like MyFitnessPal . For the complete diagram (which includes much more than the example above) see the link below.
Thinking About Serving Sizes | McKinley Health Center