There is a general rule of thumb that when you consume a protein, it should be about the size of the palm of your hand, a fist represents a vegetable portion, and a cupped hand represents your carbs.
It’s not precise by any means but anything that doesn’t use scales, measuring cups or similar won’t be.
Weigh food off for a while and you’ll get good at estimating. The labels can have a margin error of up to 20% anyways so you’ll never know the exact amount of calories you’ll eat on that specific day :)
Hi OP, you are pointing-out something I’ve learned very long ago - counting calories with accuracy is a complete exercise in futility.
But here’s the great news - unless you are an extreme athlete or something, there is absolutely no reason to count calories anyway. Anyone who eats intuitively and sticks w/the basics (limiting processed foods and sugar, eg). will be lean.
What’s pretty popular in the US are measuring cups and spoons. They’re actually standardized and if you take a product from the US, let’s say Quaker Oats, the nutrition facts say something like 100 calories per serving or per cup.
You can use this as a scale replacement. You don’t actually need to know how much something weighs or how much calories or macros you eat, you basically want something like ‘lose weight’ or ‘gain muscle’. Things like calories and macros are only tools to reach a specific goal, right?
For instance if you eat a cup of rice each day and you figure out you’re gaining weight but actually wanted to lose weight, you replace one cup of rice with 3 quarter cups of rice… I hope you know what I’m trying to say :-)
And that’s also a pretty accurate approach!
Depends on what it is. I’ve become weirdly accurate with eyeballing from a lot of scaling out things. So I’ll kind of guess based on that. I generally guess even when I have a scale to basically compare it like one of those “guess the weight” carnival games. Im just now realizing this won’t help your situation too too much. I know there’s some information online (depending on the ingredient) that outlines how much of something is roughly how many grams. OR in the past before I had my scale I would just use the “slices/leaves/etc” UOM