How to determine portion size
If you are trying to stick to a regimented diet, it can be a pain if every time you eat something you have to weigh it out in order to keep within the established diet guidelines. I have devised a much better plan, one in which normal life can take place in conjunction with the diet and people won’t think of you as a weirdo (well at least they won’t know!).
So the best method is to try and employ strategies when out and about, or even when rushing about in your kitchen that don’t force you to get out the scale in order to weigh and count and think about calories, and all that blah blah. No fuss, no nonsense. Combining good basic principles and knowledge about how to eat with an idea of what your body needs will keep things simple.
This is the basis upon which you should base your diet.
So the idea is this. Take all your favorite things, things that you always eat a lot of and you know will eat again and learn about them.
The fact that all products don’t have the calories quoted on the back is not a bad thing; in fact it can be a good thing. If you think about the correlation between how many details there are about the food on the packaging, and how processed (in big factories) the food is you begin to see the dilemma. In Italy where I live, alot of the food that you buy will not have any sort of nutritional information on the packaging because all of it is so fresh and wholesome. This is obviously a good thing as it shows to me that even if I can’t determine exactly how many calories I am eating I know that the produce is fresh and not made in a massive factory. This being the case I need to employ this method even further, so I consider other foods of which I know the calories and make a rough calculation.
Determining the rough calorie count
For me the most important ones are: Peanuts, tomatoes, carrots, any sort of easy to eat protein, apples etc.
- Take a handful of peanuts, which contain approximately 170 cals. Now every time you take a handful of peanuts at a bar or at home, you can roughly determine how many calories you are ingesting.
- A piece of bread at a restaurant. Determine what a piece of bread would be, roughly its size etc. and have this information in your mind so that you can know what you are eating. For example a piece of brown bread about the size of your hand, with a good amount of thickness will be about 120 cals.
- Carrots you can estimate that they have about 30 calories each for a good sized one. Tomatoes are about 20 cals each, apples, for a good size will be about 100, think of a good size pink lady or granny smith, not the small ones.
- Protein differs based on the animal. The lowest is always the white variety so chicken fish etc and in these cases you can average about 100-150 cals per 100grams. When you get to red meat and pork you are looking at more like 200-300 cals.
The idea of any good diet is so that you can manage your life and your diet as one, rather than having one that does not fit with the other. A diet that is not sustainable when social life is concerned is not one that should be practiced. Life is not about sacrifice, when it comes to food, but it is about being smart and healthy