Your built-in portion guide (it’s attached to your hand)

Most of us have never been taught what a portion actually looks like.

We go by what’s on the plate, what comes in the pack, what we’d usually have. The idea that there’s a right amount – calibrated specifically to your body – isn’t something most of us grew up with. It sounds like something that belongs in a clinical setting, not a kitchen.

Turns out there’s a practical answer, and you’re always carrying it.

Why hands?

Hand size scales roughly with body size. A bigger person has bigger hands – and needs bigger portions. A smaller person has smaller hands, and needs less. This isn’t precise science, but it’s close enough for daily life, and it has one advantage that grams don’t: it’s already personalised to you. A 75g portion of dry pasta means the same thing for everyone; a two-handful portion will naturally give more to someone who needs more, and less to someone who doesn’t.

The five measures

You don’t need to memorise much. Five shapes cover most of what you eat:

What a day actually looks like

The hand measures only make sense with context. A reasonable day – not a perfect one – involves:

Each meal doesn’t need to tick every group. But across the day, the mix matters as much as the amounts. Someone who hits 2000 calories entirely through starchy foods is technically on target and completely off balance.

Why this matters if you’re logging

When you log food, you’re usually asked for a weight or a serving size. If you’ve never thought about what a serving actually looks like, you’re guessing – and most people guess high for foods they enjoy and low for foods they feel less good about.

The hand method builds the intuition that makes logging more honest. You’re not aiming for perfection; you’re calibrating your eye. Over time, you get better at recognising what a portion of rice actually looks like on your plate versus what you habitually serve yourself. That gap is often where the useful information lives.

A note on precision

This isn’t a method for tight macro tracking. If you need clinical accuracy – managing a condition, working with a dietitian – weigh your food. But for most people, on most days, the hand method is close enough, and it travels everywhere with you.

The real goal

The point of logging isn’t to log forever. It’s to reach a point where you don’t need to – where your sense of a portion is accurate enough that it runs in the background without effort. Getting honest about what you’ve been serving yourself is a reasonable place to start.

---

Portion size guidance based on the British Nutrition Foundation’s “Your Balanced Diet: Get Portion Wise!” (pdf, 2021), developed with EIT Food and funded by the European Union. Further reading: BNF – creating a healthy diet