Figure out how many calories you are eating by comparing portions to parts of your hand and by estimating each item on a plate separately.

How many times do you look at what you are eating and think: how many calories is this? Or maybe you think about it, but you have no idea how to calculate the calorie content of a meal. And why should you know how? Calorie estimation is not a skill you learn in school or summer camp. But the good news is you can learn to estimate how many calories you are eating and once you do, you’ll never look at a plate of food in the same way again.

You’ve learned one calorie estimation method already in the Servings vs. Portions strategy. When eating food from a package, it’s relatively simple to figure out how many calories you are eating.

But what if you are at a restaurant that doesn’t tell you how many calories are in its meals? What if you are at a buffet? What if you are at home serving food from huge casserole dishes? How can you tell how many calories you are eating then?

It’s hard to estimate, because you don’t know how much food is being served, nor do you know how it was prepared. But we aren’t trying to get a perfect calorie count.  We merely need a good enough guess that you’ll be able to stay within your calorie budget. Just one restaurant meal can throw off your whole calorie budget for that day and cause you to gain weight.

Two skills will help you master calorie estimation:

1.      Handy estimation. If you can visualize how many servings you are eating in every meal, you will always be able to make a good guestimate of how many calories you are eating. One fun and practical method for visually sizing-up how many calories are in the foods you’re eating is called the Handy method: you compare food portions to parts of your hand. For example, your index finger equals about 1 ounce of cheese which equals about 100 calories.

2.      Piecemeal estimation. Using the Handy method alone isn’t good enough because the larger a meal is the more likely you are to underestimate the calories. To get around this problem, don’t worry about the meal as a whole, but use the Handy method to estimate the number of calories of each individual food item in the meal. Estimating each item individually can make your estimates up to 30 percent more accurate.

Handy Estimation

The Handy method of calorie estimation uses your hand as a reference for figuring out the approximate calories in various foods. Perhaps you’ve heard some people say one serving of chicken is about the size of the palm of your hand or a deck of cards. Both your palm and the card deck are ways of visualizing food serving sizes. The advantage of using your hand instead of other items like card decks is that your hand is always with you. Handy, isn’t it?

Some people may object to the hand method because everyone’s hand is different. That’s true, but larger people tend to have larger hands and also need more calories, so it all works out in the end.

The calorie counts in the table are useful only for creating a very approximate estimate of whatever you’re eating. For really accurate counts you’ll need to use a calorie counting computer program. But when you don’t have a label telling you how many calories are in what you are eating, these are good numbers to use as a start.

To use the table on the following pages to estimate calories:

1.      Look at the food on your plate and match it to the most similar food item under the food column in the table.

2.      Visualize how many of the hand portions of food you are eating.

3.      Multiply the number of calories for the hand portion size from step 1 times the number of hand portions you estimated in step 2. This gives you the total number of calories

The visualization step may be difficult because few of us are skilled at guessing how many of one thing fits inside another. It’s hard, but don’t worry about it. You are just aiming for a good enough approximation so you can decide how much to eat. The main step is just to think about how much you are eating. The rest is low fat gravy.

Piecemeal Estimation

People prone to being overweight tend to eat larger meals. Because of the difficulty of estimating the number of calories in larger meals, overweight people underestimate how many calories they are eating. That’s why it’s perfectly reasonable for an overweight person to think they are eating fewer calories than they are. Now, if you could better estimate the calories, don’t you think you could make better eating decisions? I think so and that’s the point behind this strategy.

Unfortunately, people think they are pretty good calorie estimators, but they aren’t. People are way off. You were not born with a calorie estimator in your brain. Your average person estimating the number of calories in a large plate of food will underestimate them by over 30 percent. Even dietitians underestimate large plates of food by nearly 9 percent. The larger the meal, the less accurate your estimations.

Why would you have an instinct to estimate calories? When food is scarce the rule is to eat whenever possible. Maybe someday they’ll develop magic glasses that automatically see everything you eat and track calories. Until then, calorie counting is a skill you’ll need to develop.

The smaller a meal, the more accurate are your calorie estimates. And that’s the main idea behind Piecemeal estimation: mentally break up your meal into small parts and estimate how many calories are in each part using either the Handy method of estimation or package-supplied serving information. Researchers have shown that your calorie estimates can be much more accurate using the piecemeal approach.

Handy Estimation Table

Fajitas Calorie Estimation Using Handy and Piecemeal Skills

Let’s run through an example of how to use the Handy and Piecemeal calorie estimation techniques to estimate one of my favorite meals, sizzling steak fajitas from Chevy’s. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a giant plate of tortillas, beans, steak, sour cream, guacamole, tamalito, onions, and peppers. All the parts of the meal are probably familiar except for perhaps the tamalito, which is a delicious concoction made from sweet corn.

The first time I ordered this meal, I had to estimate its calorie content, so I could determine how much of it I should eat. At the time, my calorie budget for the meal was 700. Just from looking at the giant, gorgeous, multilevel fajitas plate I was pretty sure it had more than that. I would have to either not eat some of the meal or put some of it in a doggy bag. The question was, how much? How do we figure out how much to eat? By using the Handy and Piecemeal calorie estimation techniques together.

With so many small portions of different foods, this meal is a nightmare for the calorie estimator. What makes the job easier is that all the food items are separate. Each item being separate makes them easier to visualize with the Handy method. Calorie estimation becomes really difficult when food has a sauce or is all mixed together in a casserole.

Let’s give it a try. Just so you know my first estimate for the meal was 1375 calories. It turned out the meal was really 1513 calories. I was off by about 140 calories, which isn’t too bad. It’s close enough to make realistic food choices.

I am basing the real calorie counts of the meal on a nutritional information sheet from Chevy’s website. Some of the calorie counts aren’t directly available from their site, so my estimations could be a bit off.

The meal comes with a pack of 3 tortillas. Using the food table, a slice of bread has about 70 calories and the tortillas were about the same size so I guessed about 70 calories for each tortilla. Looking up the calories on the web I found their tortillas are 80 calories each, so not a bad guess. My estimate was 30 calories too low.

I thought there was one handful of cooked onions and peppers, which is about 10 calories. I don’t know the actual calorie count because they include these ingredients with the steak calorie count.

A palm sized piece of steak has about 150 calories and I estimated, by visualizing all the steak pieces against my palm, that I had three palms worth of steak for 450 calories. The actual calorie count was 546 calories, which includes the cooked peppers and onions.

The Spanish rice looked to be about one handful for about 180 calories. The actual calorie count is 176.

The black beans looked to be a little more than ½ a fist for about 125 calories. The actual count is 175 calories. I am guessing that the difference may be additional fats included in the dish.

There’s no sour cream entry in the estimator table, I’ll use cheese as a close approximation. I know sour cream has fewer calories than cheese so I’ll use half the calorie value for cheese as a better guess. There looks to be about 3 fingers worth of sour cream for 150 calories. The actual calorie count is 121 calories.

There’s no guacamole entry in the table either. And like for the sour cream, I’ll use half the calories of cheese as an approximation. There looks to be about 2 fingers worth of guacamole for 100 calories. The actual calorie count is 79 calories.

I have no idea how many calories are in tamalito. Since it’s like a dessert, I am going to use the sweets entry in the table as a close approximation. There’s about ½ a handful of tamalito for a guess of 125 calories. The actual calorie count is 144 calories.

There’s salsa, which I didn’t estimate at all because it has so few calories. The actual count is 4 calories.

There’s a little bit of cheese. I thought there was about a ¼ finger of cheese for 25 calories. The actual calorie count is 28.

Using the Handy method combined with the Piecemeal approach is pretty accurate. My total calorie estimate for the meal is 1375 calories. The actual calorie count is 1513. So I am off by about 140. Some of my estimates were a little high, some were a little low, but they balanced out. If I were to just look at the entire plate of food and make a guess I wouldn’t be even close. I would have underestimated the number of calories in the meal by a lot.

If you ate all the tortillas in this meal, you would be at almost your daily calorie total without even realizing it. This is one important way you gain weight: unknowingly eating large portions. Is this Chevy’s fault? Not at all. They are serving you a great meal. It’s up to you what you do with it.

We just went through a calorie counting exercise that gave you enough information to make good eating decisions. If you hadn’t estimated the calorie count, you probably would have eaten the whole meal. But since you did an estimate, you can ensure you won’t overeat by taking action. What can you do?

One option is to immediately divide the meal in half, ask for a doggy bag, and eat half of the meal saving the rest for later. Using this approach I would be close to my 700 calorie budget, eat a wonderful meal, and have lunch tomorrow.

This whole process goes a lot faster in real life. The calorie estimates become second nature after a while. Scanning your plate and making size estimates isn’t too difficult. What can be hard is remembering how many calories there are for each food type and serving size. A good solution is to copy the table and take it with you.

In this example, we’ve tackled estimating a difficult and complex meal. You can use the same process for any meal. And once you get in the habit of practicing perfect portions, your chances of overeating go way down and your chances of staying on your diet go way up.

To Learn More

·        The Portion Teller by Lisa Young PhD, RD. This excellent book gives a lot of great advice on how you can practice more perfect portions. The history of how portion sizes have increased over time is worth the price of the book by itself.

·        Picture Perfect Weight Loss by Dr. Howard Shapir. Packed with beautiful pictures comparing different portion sizes, you’ll learn a lot about how many calories are in the foods you eat.